The decade that began in 1920 was the first Golden Age of the automobile in the United States. The noisy, smelly, horse-scaring machines weren't as noisy or as smelly as the earlier models, and there were fewer horses for them to scare.
Americans bought nearly 26 million cars and 3 million trucks in the 1920s, topped off by superlative sales of 4.3 million new vehicles in 1929.
For most of the 1920s, Henry Ford's Model T dominated the sales charts. From 1920 through 1926, the Model T accounted for 47 percent of new-car sales. In 1921, an astounding 61 percent of the cars sold were Model T's. But all good things give way to change, and the Model T reached the end of the road in 1927.
Maxwell-Chalmers became Chrysler Corp. in 1925, and progenitor Walter P. Chrysler bought Dodge and introduced Plymouth and DeSoto to round out his company.
In 1927 General Motors introduced the LaSalle - the first production car drawn by an automotive designer. It was Harley Earl's first GM car.
And on Thursday, Aug. 27, 1925, Automotive Daily News was born in New York.
