Detroit Automobile Company. The automobile had passed from the initial
stage where the fact that it could run at all was enough, to the stage
where it had to show speed. Alexander Winton of Cleveland, the founder
of the Winton car, was then the track champion of the country and
willing to meet all comers. I designed a two-cylinder enclosed engine of
a more compact type than I had before used, fitted it into a skeleton
chassis, found that I could make speed, and arranged a race with Winton.
We met on the Grosse Point track at Detroit. I beat him. That was my
first race, and it brought advertising of the only kind that people
cared to read. The public thought nothing of a car unless it made
speed--unless it beat other racing cars. My ambition to build the
fastest car in the world led me to plan a four-cylinder motor. But of
that more later.

The most surprising feature of business as it was conducted was the
large attention given to finance and the small attention to service.
That seemed to me to be reversing the natural process which is that the
money should come as the result of work and not before the work. The
second feature was the general indifference to better methods of
manufacture as long as whatever was done got by and took the money. In
other words, an article apparently was not built with reference to how
greatly it could serve the public but with reference solely to how much
money could be had for it--and that without any particular care whether
the customer was satisfied. To sell him was enough. A dissatisfied
customer was regarded not as a man whose trust had been violated, but
either as a nuisance or as a possible source of more money in fixing up
the work which ought to have been done correctly in the first place. For
instance, in automobiles there was not much concern as to what happened
to the car once it had been sold. How much gasoline it used per mile was
of no great moment; how much service it actually gave did not matter;