The motor car as a system: roads, fuel, rules, safety and Australia's car industry

The history of the motor car is usually told through its machines: the first petrol-engined vehicles of the 1880s, the Model T and the moving assembly line, and the steady refinement of engines, gearboxes and bodies. Those machines matter, but on their own they explain surprisingly little. A car without a sealed road, a fuel supply, a mechanic, a licence, road rules, insurance and a way to pay for it is an expensive curiosity. The motor car changed how people lived and worked only when a whole system grew up around it.

That system took decades to build and involved governments, oil companies, road builders, banks, insurers, regulators, engineers and millions of drivers. It also brought enormous costs, above all in road deaths and injuries, which were reduced only when engineers, governments and the public began treating safety as a property of the whole system rather than the responsibility of individual drivers alone. Australia played a notable part in that story and also built, sustained and eventually lost a national car manufacturing industry.

This article looks at the motor car as a system: the infrastructure, rules and finance that made it useful, the long effort to make it safe and clean, the rise and end of car manufacturing in Australia and the lessons all of this holds for anyone introducing a new product or technology. The engines themselves, and the mass production methods that made cars affordable, are covered in other articles. This is a general historical overview.

A machine waiting for a system

The first motor cars of the 1880s and 1890s were built by small workshops for wealthy enthusiasts. They were unreliable, expensive and difficult to operate. They also arrived in a world built for horses, pedestrians and railways.

Early motorists faced obstacles everywhere:

• Roads were mostly unsealed, dusty in dry weather and muddy in wet. Long journeys were adventures.
• Fuel was sold in tins by general stores, chemists and hardware shops rather than at dedicated outlets.
• Repairs depended on blacksmiths, bicycle makers and the owner’s own skill.
• Laws had been written for horse-drawn traffic and heavy steam road vehicles. In Britain, rules that had required a person to walk ahead of road locomotives were relaxed for light motor vehicles only in 1896.
• Starting a car required hand-cranking the engine, which was hard work and could cause injury.

Even the question of what should power a car was open. Around 1900, steam, electric and petrol cars all competed. Electric cars were quiet, clean and easy to start but limited in range by their batteries. Petrol cars won for several reasons that had as much to do with the surrounding system as with the vehicles themselves: cheap and plentiful oil, the energy density of petrol, longer range on poor roads and, from 1912, the electric self-starter, which removed the need to hand-crank the engine and took away one of the electric car’s main advantages.

Building the system

Over the first half of the twentieth century, the system around the car grew step by step.

Each element reinforced the others. More cars justified better roads, and better roads encouraged more cars. More cars supported more service stations, and more service stations made cars more practical. This kind of mutual reinforcement is a feature of many technology systems: early growth is slow while the supporting system is thin, then accelerates once it reaches a certain density.

In Australia, distances were vast and populations sparse, so the road system grew unevenly. Main roads between cities were gradually sealed, while many rural roads remained unsealed for much of the century. Governments created road authorities to plan and fund road networks, and fuel taxes and registration fees became significant sources of revenue.

The cost: road deaths

The car brought freedom, mobility and economic growth. It also brought death and injury on a scale few had anticipated. As car ownership grew rapidly after the Second World War, road deaths in Australia rose with it. The national road toll peaked in 1970 at more than 3,700 deaths in a single year.

For a long time, road crashes were treated mainly as the fault of individual drivers, to be addressed by exhortation and enforcement. Gradually, engineers and researchers began to treat road safety as a system problem.

A systems view of crashes

In the 1960s and 1970s, the American public health researcher William Haddon developed a framework, now known as the Haddon matrix, that analysed injuries by combining three factors (the human, the vehicle and the environment) with three phases (before the crash, during the crash and after the crash). The matrix showed that injuries could be prevented or reduced at many points, not only by preventing driver error. A vehicle’s structure could absorb energy in a crash. Roadside barriers could stop a car leaving the road. Fast emergency response could save lives after a crash.

Engineering the vehicle

Vehicle safety engineering advanced through the second half of the twentieth century:

• Seatbelts. In 1959, the Swedish manufacturer Volvo introduced the modern three-point seatbelt and made the design freely available to other manufacturers.
• Crumple zones. Vehicle structures were designed so that the front and rear deformed in a controlled way, absorbing crash energy while the passenger compartment stayed intact.
• Padded interiors, collapsible steering columns and head restraints reduced injuries inside the car.
• Airbags, anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control followed in later decades.

Rules, enforcement and behaviour

Australia became a leader in some road safety measures. In 1970, Victoria became the first jurisdiction in the world to make wearing seatbelts compulsory, and the other states followed. Random breath testing, introduced in Victoria in 1976 and in New South Wales in 1982, reduced drink-driving and is widely credited with significant falls in road deaths. National vehicle standards, known as the Australian Design Rules, have set requirements for vehicle safety and emissions since the late 1960s and early 1970s, and independent crash-test ratings have been published in Australia since the 1990s.

The Safe System approach

Today, Australian road safety strategies are based on the Safe System approach. It accepts that people will always make mistakes and that the human body can tolerate only limited crash forces. The aim is therefore to design roads, speeds, vehicles and rules so that mistakes do not lead to death or serious injury. Australia’s annual road toll is now less than half its 1970 peak, despite a much larger population and many more vehicles.

Cleaner cars

Cars also affected air quality. In cities, exhaust emissions contributed to smog, and lead added to petrol to improve engine performance spread into the environment. Governments introduced emission standards, and catalytic converters became standard on new cars. In Australia, new cars were required to use unleaded petrol from 1986, and leaded petrol was phased out by 2002. Each step required coordinated changes across the system: engines designed for unleaded fuel, refineries producing it, service stations selling it and standards requiring it.

Australia’s car industry

Australia assembled cars from imported kits from the early twentieth century. Ford began assembling vehicles in Geelong in 1925, and General Motors established assembly operations in several states. After the Second World War, governments encouraged full local manufacture. In 1948, General Motors-Holden launched the Holden 48-215, widely promoted as “Australia’s own car”, and it was a great success.

For several decades, car manufacturing was a major industry, with its largest plants in Victoria and South Australia and an extensive network of component suppliers. It trained generations of engineers, toolmakers, technicians and managers and supported a wide supply chain of metalworking, plastics, electrical and engineering firms. Tariffs and local-content rules protected the industry for much of its life.

From the 1980s, governments progressively reduced protection to make the industry more competitive and to lower car prices. Australian manufacturers faced a small domestic market spread across many models, rising competition from imports, a strong Australian dollar at times and the scale advantages of global manufacturers. One by one, producers closed their Australian plants. Mitsubishi stopped manufacturing in 2008, Ford in 2016, and Toyota and Holden in 2017, ending large-scale car manufacturing in Australia.

The closures affected component suppliers as much as the carmakers. Some suppliers closed. Others survived by applying their skills in precision manufacturing, quality systems and tooling to other industries, including defence, mining, medical devices, agriculture and transport equipment. Their experience shows both the risk of depending on one customer industry and the value of transferable capabilities.

The next system change

Electric vehicles bring the story full circle. A century ago, electric cars lost to petrol partly because of range and the lack of a supporting system. Today, improved batteries are making electric cars competitive again, and the questions are once more about the system: charging networks, electricity supply and pricing, grid capacity, servicing skills, battery recycling, standards for plugs and charging protocols, and rules for road funding as fuel tax revenue falls. As with the first transition, the vehicles are only part of the change.

Lessons for engineers and businesses

A product is only as useful as its system

The car needed roads, fuel, mechanics, finance, rules and insurance before it could change society. Many new products depend on complementary infrastructure, services and skills. The technology is a means, not a strategy article explains why testing the surrounding ecosystem matters as much as the technology itself.

Systems grow slowly, then quickly

Mutual reinforcement between cars, roads and service stations meant slow early growth followed by rapid adoption. Businesses introducing new products should expect the same pattern and plan for a long early phase.

The winner is not always the best machine

Electric cars had real advantages around 1900, but petrol won because of fuel supply, range and the self-starter. Technical merit matters less than fit with the surrounding system.

Design for human error

The Safe System approach accepts that people make mistakes and designs so that mistakes are survivable. The same principle applies to workplaces, machines and processes. The so far as is reasonably practicable article explains how Australian workplaces make and record safety risk decisions.

Open standards can save lives

Volvo’s decision to share its seatbelt design allowed rapid adoption across the industry. Some innovations create most value when they are widely used rather than closely held.

Avoid dependence on one customer industry

Component suppliers that served only carmakers were exposed when the industry closed. Suppliers with transferable capabilities and diverse customers were better placed to survive.

Production methods are part of the system

Affordable cars depended on interchangeable parts, specialised tools and the moving line. The interchangeable parts and the rise of mass production article traces how those methods developed.

A worked example

This is an illustrative example. The business and figures are hypothetical, and energy prices, fuel prices and vehicle consumption vary.

A small catering business considers replacing a diesel delivery van with an electric van. Each day, the van travels about 120 km. The diesel van uses about 10 litres per 100 km, or 12 litres a day, and at $2.00 a litre fuel costs about $24 a day. An electric van using about 0.25 kWh per km would need about 30 kWh a day, which at an off-peak electricity price of $0.20 per kWh costs about $6. The difference is about $18 a day, or roughly $4,500 over 250 working days a year.

The owner then looks at the system around the vehicle. Charging overnight at the depot needs a dedicated charger, and an electrician finds that the switchboard needs an upgrade, adding to installation costs. One weekly delivery route is close to the van’s practical range in hot weather with the refrigeration unit running, so the business plans a mid-route charging stop at a public charger. Servicing must be arranged with a dealer qualified for electric vehicles, and the insurer and drivers need to be briefed. With those elements in place, the van makes sense; without them, the fuel saving alone would have been misleading. Like early motorists, the business finds that the vehicle is only part of the decision.

How this applies to a small Australian business

• Map the system a new product, vehicle or technology depends on: infrastructure, skills, services, finance and rules.
• Expect slow early adoption while supporting systems develop.
• Judge technologies by their fit with the surrounding system, not only their specifications.
• Design work and equipment so mistakes are survivable, not just less likely.
• Diversify customers and markets, especially if you supply one industry.
• Develop transferable capabilities that can serve other industries.
• Watch for system changes, such as electrification, that affect your vehicles, equipment and customers.

Questions worth considering

• What infrastructure, skills and services do our products depend on, and who provides them?
• Are we judging new technologies on their specifications or on how well they fit the system around them?
• Where do our processes rely on people never making mistakes?
• How dependent are we on one customer industry, and what would happen if it declined?
• Which of our capabilities could serve other industries?

Bringing it together

The motor car changed the world only when a system grew up around it: roads, fuel, maintenance, finance, rules, insurance and new urban forms. Petrol won over steam and electricity partly because of that system. The car’s human cost was reduced when road safety came to be treated as a system problem, through engineering, regulation, enforcement and the Safe System approach, and Australia played a leading part. Australia also built a car industry that trained generations and supported a broad supply chain, before global competition brought large-scale manufacturing to an end in 2017. As electric vehicles bring another system change, the lessons are clear: products depend on their systems, adoption starts slowly, the best machine does not always win, mistakes should be survivable and dependence on a single industry is a risk worth managing.

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Source: KEVOS editorial notes. Examples and figures in this article are illustrations. This article is a general historical overview.