In 1927, Henry Ford introduced his Model A car, and with it the notion of mass production. The price of the first Model A was $550. In June, I bought a new car, a Daihatsu Charade (known in many other markets as the Cuore), for $18,041 on the road.

The Model A was taller, longer and far more powerful than my comparatively pitiful Charade. How come my little box on wheels cost 33 times as much as a far more powerful Model A?

Several factors combine to answer that question.

The largest single element is the devaluation of the buying power of money since 1927. Using statistics issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (from 1927 to 2002) and the US Bureau of Labour Statistics via the Bermuda Government (2003 to May 2005), it is possible to calculate that one 1927 dollar would be worth $10.41 on the day I bought the car. That means that, everything else being equal, Ford Motor Company would have had to charge $5,726 in June to achieve the same monetary value that $550 would have earned them in 1927.

The precision of that complex calculation is somewhat belied by the estimates I am forced to make on many of the other factors of price inflation when comparing the Model A to the Charade.

Ford's car was a very basic vehicle indeed, compared to the relative sophistication of my Charade. By almost every physical yardstick, the Charade is the superior vehicle. In no particular order, the Charade has a better paint job, a more sophisticated engine, drive shaft and other moving parts, all by a huge margin; a fine CD player and AM/FM radio; power steering (invented in 1926, but not available on the Model A) and front power windows; tyres of a much more sophisticated construction; a cigarette lighter; an electric odometer that welcomes me with a text message that reads "Hello happy" and bids me farewell with "Good-by"; exceptionally comfortable seats; a sporty steering wheel; and any number of other improvements, safety features, modern inventions and other junk.

Not everything has improved with the passage of time. The Model A sat four in comfort, which the Charade does not. The Model A was sufficiently well-designed that when it rained, the water stayed outside the car. The Charade is designed to dump rainwater in the driver's lap. The design of the Model A had a certain style and charm; the Charade is ugly, its boxiness turned into ungainliness. The Model A had a spacious boot, or trunk as it was called; the Charade only has trunk space for three bags of groceries. To own a Model A was to be the envy of one's neighbours and friends. To own a Charade is not.

Mr. Ford used to say that customers could have their Model A in "any colour, provided it was black". His totalitarian approach to car making lives on in spirit. I had no choice in buying all the unnecessary extras that Hyundai has thrown in, and I will have no choice but to pay a greater price when all the clever electronics break down and strand me in a rainstorm, as they surely will. I won't be "hello happy" then.

If we estimate all these improvements as being worth three times as much money as the Model A had going for it, that would make the $5,726 quoted above worth $17,178.

Included in my cost, but not in Mr. Ford's, was $363 for insurance, $380 for initial rustproofing and $264.32 for the Bermuda Government for examination and licensing. Take those away from the $18,041 I paid, and you have $17,034.

The proximity of the calculated value of $17,178 for the Model A and my actual cost of $17,034 for the Charade is a coincidence. Items that increased my cost included shipping charges from Japan to Bermuda; recent weakness in the US dollar; a hefty import tax on the car, payable to the Bermuda Government; and (I'm guessing) HW&P's larger profit percentage than Mr. Ford could have dreamed of, due in part to a relative lack of competition, economies of scale and what the market will bear in Bermuda.

Had Mr. Ford's production process not revolutionised the way cars are made, my Charade would have cost much, much more (and I wouldn't have bought it). The manufacturing cost of the Charade is a fraction of what the Model A cost to make, in constant dollars, thanks to the steady stream of improvements in mass production (chief among them reducing the human factor) over the intervening 78 years.

There was no cheaper car than the Model A in 1927, and HW&P had no cheaper new car when I visited their showroom earlier this year. The Model A was a revolution that changed the face of the planet, whereas the Charade is merely a cheap way of getting me to Hamilton slightly less wet and a little quicker than would be the case if I walked.

It is entirely possible that, at some future date, historians will mark the introduction of the Model A as the beginning of the end of mankind. It is entirely impossible that anything other than this newspaper column will mark the acquisition of my Charade for any reason whatsoever. A small part of the difference is the revolution in personal transportation that Ford's genius permitted.

When I first approached this column, I intended to make the case that the Charade represented poor value. After all, $18,041 is a great deal more than $550. All things considered, however, I have come to believe that I just might have got a bargain.