It has been said that the manufacturers of automobiles lost interest in national reliability tours after the test of 1911. Perhaps many did. But the truth, as told by a wonderfully efficient engineer, is that there remained nothing more that a national tour could teach the car builder. He had measured the power of his steel to withstand shock, he had calculated the efficiency of his motor to stand its daily tasks on a strenuous schedule, he had learned of the troubles of his rivals and he had spent his money liberally, at the direction of his engineering department, to make a car that would do anything a less skillful driver than a national tour pilot could ask of the machine. The national tour became a luxury. It was revived in 1913 on the long and strenuous grind from Minneapolis to the Rocky Mountains, and an immense amount of valuable information was the result. But the national tour seems to be now chiefly remembered by the occasional discourse of an engineer who tells of the long struggles in the mud and the hardships of sand and dust storms. With the added development of the plants, came another reason why the national tour was not necessary. Testing tracks were added to the maker’s plant assets. Testing on the roads followed the block tests of the motors, and it began to be accepted as an axiom in the industry that the engineer knew to a hair’s breadth what his engine could do before it went out of the secret room where the chief engineer worked. Meanwhile prices constantly were beaten down. The field of opportunity to own a car widened. It was, even then, so much bigger, in comparison to that in the Old World, that even the clerk and small salaried man in general looked with a smile toward the day when he would own a car. It is recalled that when the manufacturer began boldly to put the farmer in the class of available prospects—openly declared his idea of building a car that he could sell in the agricultural districts as readily as cars were sold in the city districts, one man who this year is making 750,000 automobiles, gave to the world his edict which resulted later in the United States court sustaining his contention that the “Selden patent” under which the organization of makers was maintaining its official life, “was not basic, in fact was not worth the paper it was printed on,” and he would refuse ever to recognize the right of the national organization to grant licenses to make the internal combustion engine and the chassis that went with it.