Rambler (automobile, 1902)

The Rambler was an early American automobile built by the Thomas B. Jeffery Company, introduced in 1902 and notable as one of the first cars in the United States to be built on a genuine mass-production basis rather than assembled individually to order, with more than fifteen hundred produced in its first full year of production, an unusually large output for the time. Built with a simple, reliable single-cylinder engine and features such as a steering wheel rather than the tiller common on many contemporary cars, it helped establish the Jeffery company, later renamed Nash Motors, as one of the more successful early American automobile manufacturers, and its production methods anticipated aspects of the standardized manufacturing that would later define the industry.