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According to Douglas Brinkley, who wrote Wheels for the World on the occasion of the 100th year anniversary of the Ford Motor Company, “Ford’s reasonably priced and well made assembly-line Model T mobilized America’s middle class.”

Before the introduction of the Model T by Ford in 1908, only the rich could afford an automobile. Priced at $850, the Model T began America’s love affair with the automobile by making the purchase of a car possible for a wider range of Americans, even the ordinary workers in the country’s steel and automobile factories. The rest is history.

In much the same way, the motorcycle has liberated hundreds of millions of Chinese. When I first began traveling through the China countryside in 1993, I was amazed at how motorcycles were being used to transport people and goods over less than ideal roads, in much the same way that Americans might transport people and goods on American highways. It was not uncommon then, and it is not uncommon now, to see whole families riding on a single motorcycle, or a farmer transporting a dozen chickens to market on his two wheeled “truck.”