Could you only drive in perfect weather conditions at first? As in were cars able to operate in the rain or snow from the very beginning? If not, what innovations helped cars become a weather resistant?
Hi there, sorry it's taken me two weeks to get to this; I hope you're still interested!
The answer to this really depends on what you mean by "able" in your question: Were cars physically, mechanically capable of driving in any weather? Could they do it consistently? Were they designed to be driven in any weather? I'm going to try to address most of these and a few more by giving an overview of the role driving conditions played in the early years of the automobile, focusing mainly on the United States.
In a sense, a car's "ability" to drive in poor conditions is heavily dependent on the drivers' commitment to do so, and their idea of what it means to drive a car "successfully." To give an example: in 1903, Vermont physician H. Nelson Jackson and his chauffeur completed the first transcontinental automobile crossing, driving from San Francisco to New York in their Winton automobile in 63 days, encountering rain, muddy roads, and . Despite suffering a broken bolt, no less than two broken connecting rods (a breakdown that would mean a one-way trip to the junkyard for many modern cars), and a loose axle nut that sent ball bearings all over the road, Horatio Jackson declared that "the car did not give me much trouble" and bragged that he had only gone through two sets of tires on the journey. I think it's quite safe to say that a turn-of-the-century motorist would have a very different definition of a "successful drive" than a modern one.
In terms of physical and mechanical capability, cars were for the most part capable of driving year-round. The first auto race in America, the 1895 Chicago Times-Herald race, was held in late November in near-freezing temperatures, through muddy, snowy streets: the winner, a Duryea motor wagon, took eight hours to drive the 54 miles between the Worlds' Fair grounds in Chicago to Evanston and back.
All that being said, driving in the winter was unpleasant. Before electric starters became standard equipment, starting a gasoline car in the cold weather by hand-crank was a frustrating and backbreaking task, as the fuel vaporized in the carburetor would condense in the manifold before it had the chance to ignite in the cylinder - early cars often featured priming cups (the brass valve-like fixtures mounted in the cylinder head next to the spark plugs) so that gasoline or other fast-igniting fuel could be introduced straight into the combustion chamber (when opened, they also served as compression releases, which lightened the burden of cranking somewhat). Another major impediment to wintertime driving was the lack of closed-body cars. While closed cars existed early on, they were cumbersome and heavy (The Model T Town Car weighed 300lbs more than the touring-body), and the underpowered, unreliable engines of the day meant that a closed-body variant would have drastically reduced performance compared to its open-topped counterparts. The development of more powerful six-, eight- and twelve-cylinder engines in the twenties finally made closed-body cars an attractive option - in 1919, only one in ten cars purchased was closed-body (most of them in the luxury field), but by 1929 sedans made up 90% of sales. For owners of open-topped vehicles who wanted to drive in the cold, their only option was to layer up - the faster you wanted to go, the more clothes you would need!.
Spring, however, offered the biggest challenge to early motorists: mud. A 1904 survey showed that only 7.14 percent of American roads were surfaced at all, and only a few hundred miles of road in the entire country were adequate for auto traffic.^1 Across the country, but especially in the south and west, a graded dirt road was the best a motorist could hope for. But with snowmelt and spring rainstorms, these roads became impassable mud pits, and the high speed of automobiles (at least, relative to horses) created unprecedented wear-and-tear on already inadequate roads. Early automobiles, with their narrow, often untreaded tires, anemic engines and two-wheel drive were often no match for mud, and the "car stuck in the mud" became a regular tableau. The sorry state of the roads led auto industry pioneer Albert Pope to lament that "the American who buys an automobile finds himself with this great difficulty: he has nowhere to use it."
I hope this answer helps, and I'd be happy to answer any follow-up questions you have!
Other sources are: America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910 and The Automobile Age, both by James Flink, and for further reading you might want to check out the section "From Out of the Mud to On the Open Road" in The Automobile and American Life by John Heitmann
