Look, I’m not trying to get into a micturating contest with our pals over at The Old Lighting Site, but there was a story on there repeating Mercedes-Benz’s lie that I simply cannot abide, something that, during my many years at that site, was a lie I repeatedly sought to dispel. The story is called, simply, Happy 140th Birthday To The Automobile, and that headline, and more importantly Mercedes’ claim, is wrong. The claim is wrong by 117 years, wrong about the automobile in question, wrong about the country of origin, and wrong about the person behind that automobile. It’s all wrong, and while our friends at Jalopnik are being fed, just like everyone else, this lie by Mercedes-Benz about the birth of the automobile, they should know better, because while I was there I wrote about how Mercedes-Benz’ claim of inventing the automobile is just plain wrong. Many, many times.
The article is referring to Mercedes-Benz’ claim that the Benz Patent-Motorwagen of 1886 was the “first automobile.” It absolutely was not. This isn’t even a matter of opinion or some pedantic splitting of hairs; if we define an automobile by what it actually is – a wheeled, motorized land vehicle capable of propelling itself – then the Benz machine was beaten to the punch by over a century, because Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot built such a machine – an automobile – way back in 1769. Some say 1770, but still.
[Ed Note: We changed our original headline, “A Car Website You All Know Is Pushing Mercedes-Benz’ Lie That They Invented The Car And I’m Not Having It,” because some of our friends at Jalopnik were upset, even though this was really meant to be a tongue-in-cheek joke about how Jason obsessively wrote about this lie 100000 times while he worked at Jalopnik! Regardless, we’re not here to offend our friends (and in retrospect, we should have just given them a heads up), but rather to call out Mercedes-Benz first and foremost (and anyone who spreads that lie last and lastmost). -DT]
Keep in mind, this wasn’t some hypothetical thought-experiment, only existing as paper and ink: this was a real, running machine, designed to be something to haul artillery for the military. It didn’t work well, and it was involved in the very first car wreck ever because it was so hard to steer:
It wasn’t a good car, but it was absolutely a car. And it still exists! You can go see it in Paris, at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, if you’d like. Maybe someone from Mercedes-Benz can go there and carbon date it, if they want.
And look, if somehow Mercedes-Benz wants to be all weasely and try to say this was a machine for hauling, not moving people, then you know what? Fine! It doesn’t matter, because there were plenty of other cars, yes, actual, genuine passenger automobiles, after the Cugnot steam drag.
Take the London Steam Carriage from 1803, for example! This was a steam vehicle specifically built to be a passenger car by Richard Trevithick, and I wrote about it for Jalopnik back in the day, too.
If anyone at Mercedes-Benz would like to explain to me how this motorized, wheeled, trackless, road-going, passenger-carrying vehicle was not a car, I’d love to hear it.
You know what else the London Steam Carriage had? A patent. A patent from 1802. So if Mercedes-Benz wants to qualify the “first car” as the first one with a patent that was then subsequently built and driven, then our pal Rick there beat them to the punch by about eight decades.
The patent part is interesting; Carl Benz seemed to think it important enough to include it in the name of his Patent-Motorcar, but patents for automobiles go back much further than you’d think. James Watt – yes, the guy the watt is named for and an early steam engine pioneer – patented the idea of engine-driven cars sometime after 1784, but the purpose was just to try to keep people from building steam cars, because Watt thought they were a bad idea. He was a patent troll, and I wrote about that for Jalopnik, too.
In America, there was an attempt to patent an automobile in 1790, by someone named Nathaniel Reed.
Read was able to secure patents for steam engines, but Congress found the idea of a self-propelled automobile too absurd and essentially laughed him out of the place. Here’s a National Archives summary of a letter about it that was sent to Thomas Jefferson (emphasis mine):
Nathan Read (1759–1849), a minor New England inventor, presented his petition to Congress for a patent on his inventions on 8 Feb. 1790, some time before TJ received the present letter: these included plans for both a steamboat and steam road carriage. The latter was ridiculed to such an extent that he abandoned it and the former was based on a paddle-wheel arrangement not original with him, in consequence of which he presented a new petition on 1 Jan. 1791 and seven months later was granted letters patent for “a portable multitubular boiler, an improved double-acting steam engine, and a chain wheel method of propelling boats” ().
What’s really bonkers is that Read was given a patent for a steam-propelled ship, another sort of automobile, really. Water travel seemed fine, but road travel was too far? How strange.
And then of course there was the famous American George B. Selden who filed for a patent on an internal combustion car in 1879. Selden was also sort of a patent troll, though, holding back his patent until 1895 when the automotive industry was picking up, so he could get royalties from carmakers.
The point is, if it’s the patent part that Mercedes-Benz is hoping makes their automobile “the first,” then I don’t think that holds water. It may be the first patented internal combustion Otto-cycle car, though, and I think that’s a pretty big deal on its own.
We’re just getting started here, though. There was something of a boom in automobiles in England in the 1820s and 1830s, when enterprising people were building motorized omnibuses and establishing regular bus routes from London to Bath and all sorts of other places. There were many, from people like the aforementioned Trevithick and Goldsworthy Gurney and Walter Hancock, all motorized, driving automobiles, hauling paying customers from one place to another at speeds sometimes approaching 20 mph or so.
There was such a boom of these automobiles that what I believe to be the very first comic/cartoon to feature cars was drawn and published around this time, in 1831:
As I said when I wrote about this cartoon before – even correcting myself from when I wrote about it for Jalopnik:
“The cartoon is titled A View in Whitechapel Road and was drawn by H.T. Aiken. It shows what is, essentially, a traffic jam, of automobiles, buses and private cars and commercial vehicles, some of which have names like The Infernal Defiance and The Dreadful Vengance, and there’s a hot bread-vending truck that I bet smells great.”
So, if Mercedes-Benz actually invented the automobile in 1886, how is it possible that they were plentiful enough for a freaking cartoon to be drawn about them in 1831? Something doesn’t add up, and it’s Mercedes-Benz’ math. Well, I should be more fair here: math and lies.
Mercedes addresses a mere five predecessors to their car on a page called “Forerunners to the Automobile”, one of which was Cugnot’s steam drag, and the other four were internal combustion cars like theirs, one of which, built by Frenchmen Edouard Delamare-Deboutteville and Léon Malandin in 1883, even used the same type of Otto cycle engine of the Patent-motorwagen.
Why are these called “forerunners of the automobile” and not just “automobiles,” which is what they were? The hell do they mean by “forerunners?” Mercedes tries to justify it in this paragraph:
Carl Benz was the first inventor who not only had the idea of creating an engine-powered vehicle, but also designed, built and tested one. His great achievement lay in the consistency with which he developed his idea of a “horseless carriage” into a product for everyday use, which he then brought to market and as a result made his idea useful for the entire world – unlike the other inventors mentioned here.
This is such a guilty and half-assed explanation. Take that first sentence there, the one that says “Carl Benz was the first inventor who not only had the idea of creating an engine-powered vehicle, but also designed, built and tested one.” That sentence is absolutely false. Plenty of other inventors had the idea of an engine-powered vehicle, designed, built, and tested them. I’ve mentioned a bunch of them already, like Cugnot to Trevithick and Gurney and Hancock. That sentence is an outright lie.
And the second half of that paragraph? What do they mean by the “great achievement” of “consistency?” I don’t know what they’re getting at there? And the idea that the Patent-Motorwagen was “a product for everyday use” is really a stretch. If anything, that level of refinement and usability for the automobile probably didn’t truly come until the Ford Model T in 1908, especially if we count Mercedes-Benz’ phrase “made his idea useful for the entire world.”
Mercedes-Benz even having this “Forerunners of the Automobile” page at all seems like deep down they know their claim doesn’t hold water, and they’re trying to hedge things a bit. It’s not working, though. Again, the Patent-Motorwagen was a huge achievement in the automotive world, no question. It just was not, by any stretch, the “first automobile.”
I’m still not done. Let’s hop back to America, where there was plenty going on. There was Oliver Evan’s deeply strange Oruktor Amphibolos, an amphibious car/dredger thing:
Even if we don’t count that one, there were people trying to start car companies in America as early as 1851:
That never got off the ground, but others actually managed to pull off building workable cars. There was Sylvester Roper building steam-powered cars and motorcycles in the 1860s:
…and Richard Dudgeon, who built his Red Devil passenger car back in 1855:
America also hosted the first automobile race, in Wisconsin in 1878. I wrote about that for Jalopnik, too.
Maybe Mercedes-Benz is going to try to say that none of these count, because they’re mostly steam-powered cars. If that’s the case, I’d ask them what they’d call the EQS 450 or any of the other electric vehicles they sell. Are those not cars because they don’t use gasoline? Of course not. They’re cars, just like a Mercedes-Benz 230SL Pagoda is a car. But even if they wanted to play that stupid game, there were other non-steam-powered cars around.
There was Etienné Lenoir’s Hippomobile of 1863, which I also wrote about for Jalopnik, and that was an internal-combustion car that could run on a fuel like gasoline.
In 1807, Issac de Rivaz built an experimental internal combustion vehicle, and Mercedes-Benz even mentions it on their guilty-feeling page about “forerunners to the automobile,” that I mentioned earlier, all of which are actual automobiles that were developed before the Benz Patent-Motorwagen. On that page, they also mention one of their most interesting predecessors, Siegfried Marcus, who built at least two internal-combustion, gasoline-powered cars, one in 1870 or 1875, and another in 1888.
Mercedes-Benz likes to downplay the 1875 car, claiming it was actually made in 1888; I hardly think it matters, because Marcus did have a running internal-combustion car in 1875, and I know this because there are records of a noise complaint from Vienna Police being issued to Marcus and his Benzinautomobil (gasoline-powered car) from that year:
The Marcus/Benz first-car controversy has a more sinister element, because Marcus had been taught as the inventor of the automobile (I’d disagree with that, too, but still) to schoolkids in Vienna, but when the Nazis came to power in the late 1930s, they put a quick stop to that, because Marcus was a Jew. There is correspondence from the Reich’s propaganda ministry ordering that all references to Marcus inventing the automobile be expunged and replaced with Benz and his Patent-Motorwagen. I’ll have a larger investigation of this in the future, because it’s all deeply infuriating.
Maybe Mercedes-Benz will try to say the Patent-Motorwagen was the first production automobile, but even then, they’d have trouble, I think. About 25 Patent-Motorwagens were built between 1887 and 1894, but back in 1878, Amédée Bollée’s La Mancelle automobile went into series production in France, with 50 examples built; most by Bollée, but 22 of which were built by a licensee or perhaps bootlegger in Berlin.
Mercedes-Benz did have a car that could be considered the first really mass-produced car, the Velo, which had 1,200 units produced. Mercedes-Benz’ website states it like this:
“The world’s first production car with some 1200 units built was the Benz Velo of 1894, a lightweight, durable and inexpensive compact car.”
…which I think is a little misleading, since it seems to imply that 1,200 Velos were built in 1894. There weren’t. Yes, 1,200 Velos were built, but that was between 1894 to 1901, and that is impressive, but in 1894 only 67 were made. Other companies were building cars in series at this time too, though, like Panhard et Levassor with about 90 cars made in 1894. So maybe the Velo could be considered the first mass-produced car, but considering Panhard et Levassor had made over 1,000 cars by 1901 as well, along with Peugeot, who, incidentally, also likes to claim the first mass-produced car, their Type 3 of 1891 which sold 64 copies. So who knows for this one?
This all drives me nuts for so many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Mercedes-Benz is still the beneficiary of a Nazi-era propaganda campaign, and they don’t seem to be the least bit concerned with changing this, or the actual truth. I’m tired of seeing sites like Jalopnik just accept Mercedes-Benz’s flawed claims without question, especially because I spent so much time on that site trying to get the truth out there. Hell, I wrote a story in 2020 listing 10 cars made before 1869! In an easy-to-read listicle! Did no one search their own site to check if Mercedes’ claim was accurate?
The 1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen is an incredibly important car for so many reasons: perhaps the first true Otto-cycle car to be built, for example, and it definitely marked the start of a new era of automobiles as they emerged from their more experimental stages into something more common. But the notion that the Patent-Motorwagen was somehow “the first automobile” is simply absurd. The development of the car was long and slow, and the Benz machine absolutely has its place. Mercedes-Benz’s insistence on calling it “the first automobile” debases the whole history of the car, and debases Mercedes-Benz itself.
Sites like Jalopnik should know better than to perpetuate this myth that only serves one company and diminishes the work and accomplishments of so many more.
Stop it, Mercedes-Benz. Enough already.
If you think all of this is bad, go to France and ask who invented the airplane.
No need to go to France, just follow the link to that museum.
Monsieur Concorde!
Jason doesn’t have to. It’s already the backdrop of the license plate of every car he owns, even though it was only the test track.
The good news is; only like 6 people will read that Jalopy article and you were one of them.
I’ve never understood why Mercedes sticks to that claim when it is so easily fact checked. But then I remember my Mom (repeat Mercedes customer) telling me about how she saw a replica of the “first car in the world”.
Now I’ll have to try to make time to visit the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Unfortunately, I don’t know anyone with access to carbon dating.
Just used Torch’s article to help ChatGPT relearn the real history of the car. Even got it to recognize that Ford beat Mercedes to the punch of true commercial viability with their mass production vs. hand built.
I can’t tell, but I hope you’re not claiming you’ve “fixed” ChatGPT on this subject, because that’s not how LLMs work.
Also, it’s my understanding that getting an LLM to “recognize” something you tell it is not an achievement, because they are agreeable to the point of sycophancy.
You lost me when you called him “Karl”. His name was “Carl”.
Anyway, I would discount all the steam “cars” because they would never actually work in practice. They do call EVs “cars” because they work in practice, as well or better than ICE cars, but steam “cars” just don’t.
That doesn’t mean you are wrong. Carl Benz was not the first, but citing steam- powered failures as proof isn’t getting you anywhere.
In fairness, the Motor-Wagen barely worked in practice, either. I feel that whether something works reliably or not, it shouldn’t change the fact of what it is. The Dodge Hornet, for example, is still considered a car.
I was going to say the same. I can’t imagine Motor Wagen would be considered to “work in practice” by today’s standards. I’m sure it was a step ahead of steam, just as pneumatic tires were a step ahead of solid rubber, etc etc
My first two vehicles barely ran, and they were incontrovertibly cars.
Oops, I fixed the Carl. It looks better with a “K” to me! Thanks for catching that. But calling the steam cars failures is ridiculous; they were early and cumbersome, but absolutely successful. Hancock’s Automaton, for example, did over 700 runs from London to Paddington! How is that a failure? It’s all in his book, which is fascinating: https://archive.org/details/narrativetwelve00hancgoog/page/n8/mode/2up
Well neither London or Paddington are in Germany so they don’t count.
Steam cars definitely worked in practice, in fact several brands specialized in them. Jay Leno has a bunch of them, and drives them reguarly with no issues.
I really wonder where we’d be at right now if we hadn’t completely given up on steam.
Still waiting for the boiler to heat up probably.
Of course we haven’t completely given up on steam. Every large nuclear power plant is a steam plant so a good chunk of the US navy still runs on atomic steam.
I doubt it. Doble kind of had the whole thing perfected before they went out of business. Jay Leno has one and did a video on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUg_ukBwsyo
Even then, there’s still a lot of practicality issues that internal combustion doesn’t have that are probably more than the typical buyer would accept. Notably, despite Doble’s performance claims to the contrary, the water tank needs to be refilled ever 80-120 miles or so, depending on how hard you’re pushing the car, so you’ve got that, plus the liquid fuel to worry about (gasoline, kerosene, whatever you’re burning)
Pretty sure these were a long way from perfection:
“The handbook has a list of “Things for your MAN to do every day, to check on a DAILY basis””
(because if you had a car like this you had to have a MAN to take care of the car)
“Starting the car, really there are only like 13 steps to starting the car. Couldn’t be simpler”
Thanks but I prefer to get in, turn my key and go in like 10 seconds and not worry if the boiler is going to explode.
This is lampooned in movies like The Great Race (1965), in which the (solo) woman entrant (played by Natalie Wood) drives a steam car and is lectured by Tony Curtis’ character for choosing “the wrong car” when it inevitably breaks down.
Well yeah. The manual says as much:
“The handbook has a list of “Things for your MAN to do every day, to check on a DAILY basis””
(because if you had a car like this you had to have a MAN to take care of the car)
https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo?si=do5qNkdNP4hPG8q7&t=316
…except for the whole “My face was on fire” thing, but yeah.
to be fair it was gasoline that burned his face, despite it being a steam powered car.
Also at the time no one said “these steam engine cars don’t work in practice” regardless of how we look at them now. They said HOLY SH*T NO HORSES before fainting and being revived only with the help of smelling salts.
They also wrote warnings that we’d all die bc the human body cannot survive at speeds above 30mph.
You’re not wrong Torch. In fact I have a photograph of an 1870 Marcus saved on my computer here at work, and I believe I was made aware of this vehicle because of your work at the old place.
“Maybe Mercedes-Benz will try to say the Patent-Motorwagen was the first production automobile, but even then, they’d have trouble, I think. About 25 Patent-Motorwagens were built between 1887 and 1894 …”
I have thoughts on this. Part of my vehicle applications crusade with NAPA led me to correct and flesh out all Benz, Mercedes, and Daimler vehicle data that appears in our cataloging from 1886 to the 1926 merger (ignore for a moment the 1884 listing for some kind of AMG product which is clearly an error).
During my research I found this incredible website that thoroughly cataloged every premerger car, and I referenced it extensively: et.mercedes-benz-clubs.com Sadly for whatever reason the link is now dead. However, I also read into the history of the Motorwagen, and while it’s true his first vehicle ran either in early 1886 or late 1885, it wasn’t really in production. The first one was considered the Model 1, and the second one was considered the Model 2, but it’s very hard to get a handle on exactly when the second one was built. Therefore there may not ever have been any such thing as an 1887 Benz. The Motorwagen didn’t really go into production until the arrival of the refined Model 3, which could have been as late as 1888 or after. Lore also states that Carl Benz didn’t really see his creation as commercially viable until Bertha’s famous drive. Supposedly the success of that trip convinced him the Motorwagen might have a use case beyond a curiousity. Maybe Bertha was trying to convince him, hey maybe do something with this thing you’ve spent so much time on.
According to the data pack I sent NAPA which was built from the site referenced above, the Models 1 and 2 made do with a 954cc engine, and subsequent Model 3’s used a variety of engines in their more robust frames, some as large as 1990cc. It’s pretty much impossible to accurately date when and how many Motorwagens were made each year through 1894 so we just covered the whole range as the vehicle was offered for sale over those years. But surely in those nascent times they were presumably build to order.
But again, and forgive me as I researched this long ago, as I remember reading it, Benz may or may not have intended to put the car in production and on sale back in 1886. I don’t recall exactly but I think the Benz company wasn’t even set up until a few years later.
The Motorwagen is an important vehicle, no doubt, and the fact that the company that built it still exists is astounding. They have a claim I suppose, but it’s highly specific if you’re going to say first Otto-cycle car or whatever it is. If we’re not defining “first car” as “first car marketed” (which seems vague in itself), then clearly motorized land vehicles long preceded it.
Are you saying it’s thanks to you that I can get a replacement hot-tube ignition burner at NAPA for my Panhard et Levassor Type A?
Not quite. It’s thanks to Matt you can have them look up the part number and say “hm, looks like it’s on backorder. Would you like to sign up for an alert for when it’s back in stock?”
By the standards of the time–and the fact it was likely the first 4-cycle car/engine combo produced in multiple copies–I would say it entered production. But it was obviously extremely limited and bespoke until 1890 when it was directly challenged in Stuttgart by Daimler and Maybach who had begun to produce their own Otto-cycle engines (not a surprise since both of them once worked for Nicolaus Otto; and Otto himself visited Lenoir). I believe the Victoria model from Benz added a wheel and the Velo substantially advanced both the engine and the steering.
What’s interesting is how quickly the dynamic changed by 1890, and how many independent inventors arrived at the same general type of engine design. Both Benz and DMG financed a lot of their early growth through the sale of their licensed engines, which by the early ’90s found their way into a lot of the other automobile manufacturers lineups. Peugeot, for example, competed with Benz in France using Daimler engines before developing their own.
Let me clarify therir claim: Carl was the first in his family to invent a car. All those predecessors are just that, predecessors. He had to have something to base his invention on.
“this was a real, running machine, designed to be something to haul artillery for the military”
No Jason. That is clearly a TRUCK.
“Take the London Steam Carriage from 1803, for example! This was a steam vehicle specifically built to be a passenger car”
Nope! Also a truck. It’s even rolling coal out of it’s truckbutt.
Bus. It’s a bus.
They’re all automobiles, regardless.
It’s a truck carrying a box of people.
What are you going to tell us next, that Elon Musk didn’t invent the electric car?
“I’m tired of seeing sites like Jalopnik just accept Mercedes-Benz’s flawed claims without question.” That’s pretty much how Jalopnik works…don’t want to jeopardize those press junkets!
Well they just got themselves uninvited from the next Cugnot launch.
Okay now that you’ve joked this it’s only a matter of time before someone acquires rights to the Cugnot brand, and relaunches it as a new company. Probably with a 2000hp hypercar with funding from Bahrain or something.
A true Cugnot relaunch would be a 20,000lb trike. Bring it!
The 10 ton version is the super legerra
As long as it’s powered by steam.
The Old Site has become a morass of dull drivel. Regurgitating press releases is easy (and lazy) content. I gave up on them months ago.
But how else will you know “what happens if you don’t change your car’s oil?”
And it seemed like they were either running AI slop or the writers weren’t getting fact-checked (or both). I haven’t been there since I noticed the massive decline.
Years.
I went from a daily reader, to a daily reader that visits both sites, to (for the last year at least) a daily reader that only goes for NPOND. It looks like Rob is still around, but he missed the beginning of last week and that was going to be the nail in the coffin for me. I just love reading that every morning, and I hope that when Jalopnik finally ends that the owners of this site have a good enough relationship with Rob to maybe have him come over here.
As punishment for their lies, we should make them merge with Chrysler again.
That deal worked out much better for them than Chrysler, so how would it be a punishment?
I think it would be different this time.
The whole site has just gotten sad. One of the first comments is a link to Torches old article. LOL!
I stopped visiting the old site because it makes me sad to see what it has become. The Herb came in to burn everything to the ground, and burn it all down he did.
So Germany wanted to boast that they invented the car and then Nazis switched inventors because they didn’t want to give any credit to a Jewish German. That doesn’t surprise me, because Nazis gonna Nazi. For the current Mercedes-Benz to keep repeating that lie because it would conveniently make their guy the inventor of the car is fucking disgraceful.
A lot of those cars would be classified as motorcycles in most states. Just sayin’.
BRP (canada) does the same thing with snowmobiles, it’s funny how once there’s a large corporate juggernaut they just make shit up to help their branding. The reality is the first snowmobile was produced by an American guy named Alvin Lombard.
Someone needs to make a Wikipedia page of companies currently making false historical claims. I think shame is the only way to fix this.
“I’m still not done.”
Someone isn’t maximizing page views and turning one article into three. You know we’d read a three parter, Torch.
History is written by the victors (and apparently Nazis). Cugnot et al don’t have PR departments to push back against Mercedes’ claim. So, thank you for speaking on their behalf and giving them the credit they are due.
The fact that Mercedes traces some of their “legitimacy” to nazi propaganda is shameful. It’s one thing to have been fascist collaborators at the time, but to perpetuate that same lie today despite knowing it’s baseless is indefensible. My lifelong boycott of Mercedes continues.
Wow, it took me this long, but this article finally keyed me in to the origin of the “Old Lighting Site” joke. Better late than never, I guess.
lol same. I had no idea what people were on about.
Tell this to ChatGPT.
Prompt: “what was the first automobile?”
Answer: “The first automobile – in the modern sense of a self propelled vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine – was the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, built in 1885 by Karl Benz.
Not saying this is gospel, but the the extent that people (and Jalopnik “writers”) get their information from AI, it may as well be.
We need to get Jason into a datacenter to fix this plus inyect some knowledge about taillights and beetles
Grok prompt: “what was the first self powered horseless carriage?”
1769: Nicolas -Joseph Cugnot.
This is hilarious, because there have been reports of ChatGPT using Grok’s terrible AI Wikipedia knockoff as references for answers it gives, which is obviously the start of humanity’s doom in some timeline.
But here, ChatGPT is NOT using Grok as a source… but ironically if they did, it would be more accurate.
Pro tip: half the time, you only need to tell the chatbot “no, you’re wrong,” and it will change the answer. Just doing that in my prompt above aligned ChatGPT’s response to more or less Jason’s take.
By default, AI rounds history to the nearest narrative and picks the answer that survives applause.
Sounds like our president, who rounds his opinion to the nearest conversation and picks the statement that will get him the most attention.
“They are eating the dogs and cats.”
Dang, you ruined my 48 hour not hearing about the “president” streak.
It could just be the difference in using “automobile” vs. “self powered horseless carriage”. I suppose I could test that myself, but I don’t want to go near either of them.
Not going to lie, that “I wrote about that for Jalopnik, too.” line is just BRUTAL, especially being dropped so often like that. Put that shit on a sticker and sell it.
That’s Torch just flopping his Taillight encrusted phallus on the printing press.
Tesla should troll Mercedes-Benz and post on their website that they are the true inventor of the “automobile”, as “auto” = self driving.
Something like “Society has waited over a century for a true automobile, one that can drive itself with autopilot. We are happy to claim that we are the first to have a true automobile available to purchase, that will happily drive itself everywhere, including into the back of fire trucks and the sides of semi-trailers. We appreciate all of the past work by others on manualmobiles that has led to this great achievement, but want to set the record straight that we are the first to produce a true automobile.”
Now that is copy Don Draper would’ve won a CLIO with.
I still visit the J site occasionally, but I only read posts from a carefully-curated list of writers. 70+% of posts appear to be AI-generated crap. AI appears to get its information about Mercedes by scraping their website. Sadly, the Internet is full of falsehoods which AI is happy to scrape.
I can’t go there anymore. It’s so full of trackers and malicious software and ads that my phone battery quickly starts draining and it gets ridiculously hot. Even though there are a few authors there worth following I just can’t do it.
I feel like that’s true for most of the internet now. This morning I tried to print off a graph paper template for my daughter. The amount of effort and frustration in the simplest tasks…the internet is almost unusable.
Maybe try using Edge instead of (I’m guessing) chrome? Try Opera and DuckDuckGo, too. Browser chouce matters.
Thank you for the nudge. I’ve used DDG for search but haven’t switched to their browser…yet
I run Firefox with the NoScript extension. It lets you to allowlist certain domains to run scripts (and always allows the TLD for the site you’re visiting), but by default it blocks any third-party script sources. Not only does it happen to block most ads since they’re all scripted these days, but it also cuts down on that overheating device problem.
I will grant that it’s an unnecessary PITA to get some sites to work with it and I just allow-all on their tab if I really must use the site, but for probably 90% of my browsing it’s great.
I’ve been using Opera as my browser with DDG set as my default search engine for a few years now. PC and Android. I’ve been quiet happy with that setup.
Choice^
Edge is Microsoft-flavored Chrome.
Try Waterfox. It’s Firefox without all the AI stuff.
Most of my browsing is on a work computer, so I’m very limited by what I’m able to install, and Edge is more than tolerable. I appreciate the suggestion nonetheless.
I’ll look into Waterfox. I won’t support Mozilla, but it looks like it merely uses the Gecko engine, so that might be worth a try.
Honestly, even before it was borderline unusable on mobile without adblock. Especially if you tried to load the comments.
I think I stopped going there around two years ago? Whenever it was I think it was in response to yet another Erin Marquis article with linked video about some car crash that killed a bunch of people, that essentially boiled down to “watch these people die.” I popped in a few times after that but clearly there’s no reason to anymore.
I see what you did there 😉
I was going to say that Benz was the first to commercialize his car by selling copies to owners for private use, as opposed to Cugnot’s military contract and Trevithick’s bus service. But no, Bolee beat him to that.
I’m sure they can come up with some way they were “first” but it’s gonna sound like the corvette owner who says they have a 1 of 1 bc it was the only blue manual with the optional wheel package signed off by Jim on the 27th of August.
They claim that Bertha Benz took it on the first ever cross-country trip (from one town to another), which I also hear described as the “first road trip” and “first trip by car”. In that sense, it could be a bit like the first airplanes, where glides and “hops” weren’t counted as full flights, until they managed to build machines that could gain and maintain altitude on their own, and many have different claims, from first flight over (insert distance), first unassisted takeoff, first flight over (insert altitude), etc. If so, it could be the first “successful” car, by some metric.
In that case, they can look to ANOTHER article I wrote for Jalopnik, about the Rickett Steam Car, which went on a 100 mile road trip in 1860: https://www.jalopnik.com/this-car-was-the-very-first-to-be-sold-advertised-and-1596232950/
Thanks for the link! I have a lot of reading to do today, the early age of the automobile is fascinating.
Yeah, that road trip from Inverness to Barrogill Castle was impressive, that’s for sure. Given to understand that some fair amount of planning and preparation went into the trip, though, with Rickett himself accompanying the owners to attend to the car’s boiler. What service!!
With Bertha Benz’s road trip there was some element of surprise & spontaneity and she only had her two teenage kids accompanying her (much like Otto accompanying you on the NYC taxicab crosscountry trip) so it’d be pretty much okay to give that claim about the first road trip a pass… the other claims from Mercedes-Benz, not so much!!
(ETA: FWIW, just that one link to the old lighting site resulted in my phone’s battery level going from 43% to 32% despite being there only very briefly, good grief.)
I guess? But as you said everyone can come up with their own arbitrary definitions. For me, it’s not a car unless it can drive coast to coast without refueling. So as far as I’m concerned there still aren’t any successful cars.
I agree, the metric is 100% arbitrary, as are all metrics of “success” that one could use to claim “first” in a highly-competitive field like that.
Agreed. We’ll never settle what counts as the first “car.” However I think Jason has given ample evidence that Mercedes is not in the running.
I think so, too, especially with the evidence presented of the Rickett Steam Car.
It’s a fun and fascinating thing to discuss and we can apply it to many other machines. I’m a boat nerd so I also enjoy things like the debate over where to draw the line between a dreadnought, a pre-dreadnought, and a semi-dreadnought.
(Not going to get into that because that’s not the topic here)
Yup. It’s a good mental exercise, so long as everyone can agree there’s not going to be an objective answer, just compelling arguments about where to draw the lines.
Depends on the coasts.
Well obviously it’s going to be the country where I live.
It still needs to be driven by someone named Bertha.
If that’s the US, I recommend any aspiring first-car-makers hire a Bertha and take a trip to Hawaii.
All those British road carriages trundling from town to town in the first 2/3rds of the 1800s didn’t count?
Just wanna clarify I don’t intend to defend Mercedes-Benz, just sharing what I think they use as their reasoning, which I also consider to be very much arbitrary.
And just want to clarify my annoyance was directed at them and not you. Thank you for explaining their rationale for the claim.
No see it’s got to be the first to go between GERMAN towns.
I’m so glad you keep beating this drum. Truth matters! Your move, Mercedes-Benz!