Right-Hand to Left-Hand Drive: The 1910s Shift

Why right-hand drive made sense at first

Carriages set the original pattern. When automobiles came along, a lot of early manufacturers just carried that layout over, since the people building the first cars were often the same shops that had been building carriages, and old habits carry a lot of weight in a young industry.

What actually flipped the switch

Here is where it gets interesting. As traffic on American roads started to grow, and as passing other vehicles became something drivers actually had to think about regularly instead of once in a while, the calculation changed. When you are steering around an oncoming wagon or another automobile, you want to be sitting on the side closest to the middle of the road, where the danger actually is, not on the side closest to the ditch. That put the case for left-hand drive on solid ground for the first time.

Ford gets a lot of the credit here, and rightly so. When the Model T standardized on left-hand drive starting around 1908, and then sold in enormous numbers, it dragged the rest of the American industry along with it whether competitors loved the idea or not. Once a car built by the hundreds of thousands was doing it one way, dealers and buyers alike started expecting every car to work the same way. Nobody wants to be the one manufacturer whose steering wheel is on the wrong side when a customer walks into the showroom.

Passing convenience mattered for a more everyday reason too. With the driver on the left, he could judge his clearance from oncoming traffic when passing, and passengers could get in and out on the curb side without stepping into the street. That is a small thing until you are doing it every day in a growing city with more cars on the road every year.

It did not happen overnight, and it was not universal

I want to be clear this was not a switch that flipped on one specific date. Plenty of manufacturers kept building right-hand-drive cars well into the 1910s, and some luxury makers, Pierce-Arrow among them, held out until around 1920. You will still find brass-era survivors with the wheel on the right, and they are not mistakes, they are just cars built before or during the transition, when the industry had not fully settled on one answer yet.

By the early 1920s the matter was mostly closed for American-market cars. Left-hand drive had become the expected standard, tied to how American roads worked and how American manufacturers built at scale, and it has stayed that way ever since, long after the original reasons stopped mattering to anybody.

Why this still matters if you own a brass-era car

If you are looking at a surviving brass-era car today, which side the wheel sits on tells you something real about when it was built and what market it was aimed at. A right-hand-drive American car from this window is not necessarily rarer in some universal sense, but it is a marker worth noting when you are trying to date a car or understand its original intended market, especially if the paperwork is thin.

It also connects to a bigger point about how fast the automobile industry was changing during these years. A buyer in 1905 and a buyer in 1915 were, in some real sense, driving different categories of machine, not just because engines got better, but because the whole idea of what a car should feel like from behind the wheel was still being worked out in real time.

"I had a fella bring a right-hand-drive brass-era car into a show once, and half the crowd assumed it was European. It was built right here, just built before the industry made up its mind. People forget how much was still up in the air back then."

Gary Nowak

The full story of how American roads, and American driving habits, took shape during this decade is laid out in the history of early american cars story, which covers a lot of the same ground this piece touches on the steering side of things. And once you are driving on the correct side of the road, the next question was proving you were even allowed to be there in the first place. The next installment covers how registration and license plates got started in this same period.

Sources and notes

• Wikipedia: Ford Model T
• Ford Motor Company: The Ford Model T
• Kelley Blue Book: Model T to Model Y - features that survived 100 years
• Model T Ford Club of America Forum: Left hand or right hand control
• Midway Motors: The Ford Model T and the making of modern driving

Updated November 4, 2026: Corrected: the reasons given for early right-hand drive, the Model T sales comparison, and the claim that only small makers kept building right-hand-drive cars (some luxury makers did until about 1920). Removed a folk story about Ford's decision.