Dearborn, Michigan. The year is 1914. You ease your Model T around a corner and down one of the village’s main streets. You release the left pedal, and the T’s four-cylinder engine lugs down and settles into a rhythmic chucka-chucka-chucka. You’re rolling along at 15, maybe 20 mph and life is good. You pass the new electric generating station on your left. There’s the bicycle shop on your right; the owner is on the steps, waving. A small factory at the end of the street lays quiet. And here comes another Tin Lizzie. You wave at the driver and he toots his horn.

For a moment you’re back in time, experiencing the elemental thrill of automobility as it must have been at the very beginning. The beginning of the mass-produced automobile, that is. For this is actually the Dearborn, Michigan of the present, the town is the re-created historic village that is part of The Henry Ford complex (until recently known as The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village). Only the car is real. Welcome to the museum’s special Model T driving school. Every spring and fall, The Henry Ford offers several weeks of evening classes that put you behind the wheel—and in front of the engine crank—of a Model T. As everyone knows, the T is the car that started it all—the era of mass production that enabled the democratization of the automobile and helped grow a middle class that could afford to buy the very cars it built. Could you want for any stronger reasons to drive a T into the past? Well, it’s also a hoot to drive. Our instructor on the cool, dreary spring afternoon of our class is Glenn Miller, who comes by this assignment honestly. By day he’s a veteran Ford engineer who’s developing the supercharged V8 powertrain for the new Ford GT. His other life is restoring vintage cars, of which he owns five, dating from 1912 or earlier. “I like making the parts,” he says, and he has a machine shop in his basement to prove it. This combination of engineering experience and hands-on know-how made Miller a natural to lead another Ford-sponsored project: creating two replicas of Henry’s original 1901 Sweepstakes race car for the company’s 100th anniversary of racing that took place in fall 2001. “I made the bodies for those in my basement,” Miller says modestly. We meet up with Miller at the museum’s maintenance shop, which is cheek-by-jowl with 1920s-era cars and trucks and is itself enough to take you back in time. Your $85 tuition fee ($100 for nonmembers of the museum) includes use of one of the museum’s Tin Lizzies. Our ride is a brand-new—literally—1914 T touring model. It’s one of six new ones built to original specs by Ford’s manufacturing arm as part of the company’s centennial activities. It celebrates both mass production, which started in late 1913, and Henry’s doubling the average wage to five bucks per day, which happened the following year.

First, a walk-around. The T’s strength is its simplicity, Miller points out. “It’s only about 1800 pounds. Its frame is light so it can flex on bad roads; other cars had frames twice as big attempting to reduce flex.”You want simple? How about a firewall made out of cherrywood? Floorboards made out of... boards? The three-liter, four-cylinder engine doesn’t use a water pump. There’s no heater or defroster. No windshield wipers. No door on the driver’s side. No starter motor. No gas pedal. No gear lever. No front brakes. Or rear brakes. (There’s one lonely brake on the transmission.) But there is a rudimentary ignition key. And back in ’14, it was all yours for $550 at a time when most automobiles—hand-built in limited numbers, the old-fashioned way—cost many times that.

When Henry Ford said of the Model T, “You can have any color you want as long as it’s black,” he wasn’t just being difficult. Early Ts could be had in a variety of colors. But mass production required quick-drying paint. It came in but one color: black.

Miller cranks the engine to life. Literally. We’re all aware that early cars were crank-started, but who actually knows how to do it? Not us. “Remember to keep the spark lever fully up—retarded—when you crank it,” says Miller. “It’s when people forget to keep the spark fully retarded that the crank handle snaps back, and it can even break your arm. And when you grab the crank handle, do not wrap your thumb around it. If it snaps back it can really twist your finger.” Miller points out the choke lever, conveniently located near the crank handle so you can adjust it as you flail away. “The throttle should be a third of the way open. The handbrake must be on, because that puts it in neutral.” Got that? Just getting one of these things going is a major life experience.

A couple of hard pulls on the lever and the T fires up. Miller slips behind the wheel—we have to get out to let him in, as there’s no driver’s door, remember—and we chucka-chucka-chucka around the village grounds for a few minutes.“Wow,” he says, “this one actually slows down with the brake pedal. Most don’t, so back off way early when you want to stop.” Ah, the pedals. There are three: one for the so-called brakes, two controlling the planetary transmission—sort of a semiautomatic that Henry Ford thought would be easier to operate than a manual gearbox for all those first-time drivers. The leftmost pedal controls the gears—low is all the way in, neutral is at some vague point halfway out that’s impossible to feel accurately, and high gear is all the way out. The center pedal engages reverse. The right is the brake.

Then it’s our turn. When it comes to driving a T, best to forget most of what you know; your hands and feet have new and very different assignments. Your right hand is in charge of the throttle, a lever that protrudes from the right of the steering column. The left hand works the steering wheel, and sometimes the spark advance. Your two feet work the three pedals. Coordinating everything practically grinds the nervous system to a halt. Shifting is a combination of right-hand throttle work and left-leg action. Stopping requires you to cut the throttle, brake with the right foot and use the left foot to find the elusive neutral spot. You end up going for high gear as soon as possible and lugging it around at nearly idle. Do that and it shakes and shudders worse than San Francisco on a bad day. But it doesn’t quit, either.

Luckily, Greenfield Village is closed to the public the day of our school, but there are plenty of workmen and their pickup trucks to dodge. Each surprise encounter with traffic is a momentary freakout, a stoppage of time as the new operating data are laboriously processed and mailed out to arms and legs. Judging by Miller’s fluid moves on the controls, some seat time would eventually smooth things out. After several stalls, this report-er’s arm and shoulder—you can only crank righty—is noticing the strain. How’d drivers do it when it was freezing cold out and everything was tight? “It was so tough,” says Miller, “people actually jacked the rear wheels off the ground to reduce the drag from the transmission.”In fact, the whole Model T experience is only vaguely akin to anything we associate with driving today. It’s more like a wagon ride with the horse missing. You sit up high-er than in any SUV. But the bodywork stops at hip level; your knees are actually above the tops of the doors. On this overcast 55-degree day we need to keep jackets zipped against the shivery gale that blows through the windowless interior on those few occasions when we exceed 30 mph (a Tin Lizzie can actually hit 45 mph if you’re brave enough). Winters mustn’t have been much fun. In summer, says Miller, “it was boiling inside during thunderstorms when you had the side curtains in place.”

Traveling any significant distance was hard work. “People got flats all the time. I have a log book in which the driver wrote that he went 150 miles in a day with ‘only five flats,’” says Miller with a laugh. That the Model T represented a huge leap forward for millions of average folks—a total of 16 million were sold in its 20-year production run—reflects on how modern, privileged, and flat luxurious our lives have become. There’s no better way to experience the full breadth of that chasm—the way it was and how far we’ve come—than through the seat of your pants.

For more information on the Model T driving school (it’s listed as “Driver’s Education: 1924” on The Henry Ford’s website) call (313) 982-6001 or visit www.hfmgv.org.

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