The beginning of the 1920s was the first great era of consumerism and across the globe the motor car had become the most desirable of products. This was the decade which saw the launch of the Rolls Royce Phantom 1, the Austin Seven, Ford Model A and MG sports cars, but it was also a decade of great change. 

Most significant was the advancement of automotive design, and although the cars of the era bear little resemblance to the sleek, powerhouses which are on the roads today, they were much more advanced than the "horseless carriages" which were being built around the turn of the century.

The best known and biggest selling car of the period was still the Ford Model T, but the techniques of mass production which Henry Ford had pioneered a few years earlier meant that the total number of car makers began to increase at a phenonemal rate -with entrepreneurs everywhere seeing the potential riches that a successful car manufacturing company could bring. 

At the British Motor Show in London in 1920, more than 500 individual car makers displayed everything from elegant luxury cars for the aristocracy to the newer "light" cars for the masses. It was a similar story in America. New car makers were appearing all over the place, such as Stanwood, Manexall and Wharton, but many folded very quickly as they found they could only make a limited number of cars each year and were unable to compete with the much more established manufacturers.

For the bigger companies, by contrast, much of the "Roaring Twenties" meant roaring sales. In 1927, production of the Model T finally passed a staggering 15 million and the company had become a global industrial giant.

But just a few years later, there had been several notable changes. The Model T had been replaced by the Model A and Ford had almost been caught in the annual production race by its great rival, Chevrolet, before both companies were to feel the effects of the dramatic Wall Street Crash. This economic catastrophe initially saw a notable downturn in the demand for new cars, and one effect of this was mass unemployment. Many auto workers who previously believed they had a job for life, suddenly found they no longer had a job at all and no immediate prospects of work.

The extent of change meant that in Britain, many of the earlier car makers had disappeared altogether, such as Bean, Clyno and Crosssley, while others such as Bentley, Lagonda and Sunbeam had been swallowed-up by larger enterprises in order for them to continue. The three leading manufacturers were now Austin, Morris and Singer, who produced three-quarters of all the cars being sold, with each of them having just one or two models as their prominent product.

By the end of the decade there were no more than a few dozen mainstream car makers still in business across the globe, and the ones that had survived, had largely learnt how to mass produce more modest cars for the more frugal era the world was moving into.

The changes meant that 1930 was not only the start of a new  decade, but effectively, the dawn of a new era for motor manufacturing.

Motor cars of the 1920s

Duration of film. I min. 10 seconds

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1921 Ford Model T

1929 MG saloon

1929 Alfa Romeo

1929 Austin Seven

1927 Rolls Royce Phantom 1

1927 Chevrolet Capital Tourer

1927 Rover Meteor

1929 Willys Knight

1920 Vauxhall e-type

1920 Alfa Romeo 20-30 HP

1923 Studebaker Special Six Tourer

1923 Fiat Model 501

1927 Crossley

1929 Chrysler 75 Roadster

1926 Paige Model Tourer

1926 Dodge taxi

1927 Clyno Tourer

Film now showing
Cavalcade of Ford cars, 1927

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