The primary founder of the automotive industry and the modern factory, Henry Ford, has been criticized for his failure to embrace change; perhaps not entirely fairly. Most have heard the story of his famous response to a criticism over lack of color choices for his early models: “buyers could have any color they wanted as long as it was black.”
As an article from American Business History shares, automobiles had very special needs that most of the paints of the time could not meet. The real history of how we got cars in the colors we wanted is a little more nuanced, interesting, and informative, “Yet few know the real story of his intransigence about color, or how we came to have colorful automobiles.” Ford did not solve the problem of viable paints, but in fairness he did the best he could until someone else solved the problem. Here the full and fair (to Henry Ford) story of “Why Cars Don’t have to be Black.”
