This Day in History: German automotive engineer Karl Benz, officially unveiled the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the first purpose-built automobile on this day in 1886.
The original cost of the vehicle in 1886 was 600 imperial German marks, approximately 150 US dollars (equivalent to $4,524 in 2021). Karl's wife Bertha demonstrated its feasibility in a trip from Mannheim to Pforzheim in August 1888, shortly before it became the first commercially available automobile in history in the late summer of 1888.
Benz is widely regarded as "the father of the car" and "father of the automobile industry".
Henry Ford "was the first to acknowledge his debt to all the inventors and dreamers who had gone before him. 'I invented nothing new,' he conceded many years later. 'I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work, and the discoveries of still other men who preceded them. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the great forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.'” Source
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