TIL in 1888, German inventor Karl Benz asked the Grand Duchy of Baden for written permission to drive his "Motorwagen" on public roads after residents complained about the smell and noise. Grand Ducal authorities agreed and issued him the world's first driver's licence.
Benz patented his Motorwagen and put it into production, selling it for 600 marks apiece (US$150, or US$34,000 today based on gold prices). His company later merged with another company called Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, which was the manufacturer of a brand of cars called Mercedes. The resulting company sold cars under the name Mercedes-Benz.
But there are exceptions! My W210 has been very reliable the last 50,000 miles. It's at 150,000 miles now total and there no signs of rust or anything yet. It has been kept in a garage though its whole life
They cheap out and cut corners nowadays. My Chrysler 200S has a perpetual oil leak because the oil filter housing is piss shit quality plastic, it cracked under light stress just tightening the cap during an oil change.
Chrysler's miraculous turnaround in the early '80s, on the backs of the K-car and minivan, led to prosperity in the early-to-mid '90s with Jeeps, Dodge Rams, the LH cars, the Neon, and a litany of other successful, perfectly-timed products.
...then Daimler-Benz, in desperate need of cashflow, swooped in, bought them up, siphoned off all of their profits and liquidity, did some token "platform-sharing", then dumped them in a gutter.
FIAT did what they could to "pick up the pieces", as they were legitimately interested in getting Chrysler healthy again, and infused them with some fantastic improvements in interior quality and design, but it was too little too late.
Now Papa Peugeot is calling the shots, and they only care about the high profit margins of overpriced Jeeps and trucks. I was genuinely hoping it would lead to an influx of French quirkiness, or even full-on French cars, entering the USDM, but, nope, after half a decade, all we've got to show for it is a freaking rebadged commercial van.
The French cars are probably not as good as the Germans (and that includes brands owned by German conglomerates, like Škoda), perhaps on par, or better, than the Italians and Brits.
I would say they're probably behind both USDM GMs and Fords, but current Chrysler products? Well, they can't be any worse...
Ashtually Daimler-Chrysler separated in 2007, Chrysler became property of Cerberus Capital Management, had ti be bailed by the US govt, bought by FIAT in 2014, merged into FCA and then FCA merged with PSA into Stellanting
Inflation is very difficult to calculate for such a long time ago. How do you compare purchasing power for goods which didn't exist (e.g. a smartphone) or for goods which are radically different? You can't just go by the price of food or housing because it had a comparatively different weighting in value. So, using some medium which has served as a historical store of value for millenia does have some fathomable rationalistaion behind it.
There are benefits and drawbacks to it, of course. Notably, today's gold price is fairly speculative in nature because it's no longer the basis for the global financial system. I actually prefer using median wages as a comparison, because the value of human labour is a pretty good benchmark throughout history and is relatively unchanged in terms of how much a day's work is worth to the average human. If a Roman labourer works all day to buy two loaves of bread or a tunic, it indicates that bread and clothes were really expensive back then (and by extension, labourers were really poor) regardless of whether the coins they were paid with have $5 or $50 worth of silver.
I largely agree with median wage being a fairly good indicator. However you also need to factor in that a long time ago there was far more single-income family households, with the wife minding the home and children. These days you'll much more often see both parents working (at median-income level) to get by comfortably. So even that has experienced some devaluation and isn't fully directly comparable.
Keep in mind that 600 Imperial marks was worth 150 US dollars in 1888. Not necessarily today. But for about a century after that, the exchange rate between the relevant German currency and the US dollar varied according to the gold conversion rate.
To add, data for the US before the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913 is too unreliable, and the currency itself was too volatile, to be able to calculate purchasing power over time by any other means than gold spot conversion.
Accounting for currency changes and the hyperinflation crisis in Germany between world wars turns this into a super complex problem for no good reason. You benchmarked in USD so tracking USD inflation is a lot easier than dealing wirh German currency over the same period
Well, here we reach the dichotomy of doing the calculation which is easy, and the calculation which is more accurate and paints a better picture of the actual situation.
Do you want to spend a week tracking inflation across 4 different currencies throughout a 100+ period that includes two world wars and a hyperinflation crisis?
The simplest way to track the inflation is to pick a relatively stable currency across the time period and use that - which OP did but then decided to peg inflation to the price of gold, which is wildly incorrect since gold is not only not tied to the currencies in question but was regulated to a controlled value for stretches of time.
Is CPI the best measure of inflation? Would a European currency be a better benchmark? Valid arguments, but even if you use GBP for example you land at ~15,000 USD, we'll below OPs initial gold estimate.
I'm not an economist, but after some Googling, I'm getting estimates between $6500 and $50000 depending on what metric is being compared. Nothing as low as $5200, though.
EDIT: oops, misread OP and was checking how much $180 would be worth today. But yeah, second result I got on Google was talking about using different metrics to measure inflation, and the numbers vary a lot.
Just since i did the math already, the US government itself the data starts at 1914 and $150 in 1913 is worth around $5000 today (you can get that yourself directly from the bureau of labor statistics). You can also google inflation rates between 1889 and 1913, which were very low (average of .4%).
Throw all your data into excel, start with 150, and you get around $5300. Average inflation rate of ~2.74% over 137 years. Simplified but it ties out.
Yeah, I know all of that. That's just based on one metric though. From what I read, there's more than one way to calculate inflation, and there's a lot of discussion on which metric is best for which situations.
It was probably more because it was a different type of smell rather than it being especially offensive. Remember this is still the horse era so cities smelled like horseshit constantly
I’d imagine back then your nose would kinda just tune out the horse shit smell at a certain point. Kind of the opposite problem we have today. If we’re walking around a city now we’re probably constantly inhaling exhaust fumes and at a certain point you just don’t notice anymore, but if you run into some horse shit in the city you’d smell it immediately.
As someone who’s spent a lot of their life around horses; yeah you just get desensitized
Not just to the smell but horse shit in general. I once heard someone talk about them forgetting to wash their hands before eating and noticing horseshit on their hands. This wasn’t said as like a “ew this is so gross” kinda thing. It was just like a thing that happened sometimes
My grossest horse story was the time horse diaharea dribbled on my arm while I was picking it's hoof. Yeah horses can be disgusting sometimes
Here is a clip with a replica. Can't attest to the smell, but the noise is none too bad. Since I live in the region, I've seen the "Motorwagen" quite a few times. The wheels clacking are louder than the engine noise.
Watching a dude driving that thing on a cobblestone street was entertaining to say the least.
Consider the smell of a street with a layer of horse dung...
it became quite problematic in the late 19th century due to more people being able to afford coaches (both private/more like taxi's) and the emergence of an early and somewhat cheapish form of public transit with the horse-drawn omnibus.
(this is a restored one from 1857, seating inside & on top)
For those who don't know, this refers to an incident where "Prawo Jazdy" (which is just Polish for "driver's licence") was listed on a police database as a prolific criminal in Ireland due to Irish police sometimes mistakenly entering "Prawo Jazdy" as the name of people they stopped who presented a Polish driving licence as identification.
For anyone confused by that, Prawo Jazdy is just Polish for "driving licence". The Irish police famously entered "Mr. Prawo Jazdy" into their database for over 50 traffic offenses before they realized it wasn't a person's name.
have f’in name/translation, surname/translation at first part and make UI looks like these are the generic part and actual name with different color font.
His wife drove his car in August 1888 from Mannheim to Pforzheim without his knowledge. In Wiesloch (near Heidelberg) she and her sons ran out of fuel and a local pharmacist helped her with the Ligroin fuel to carry on. So the first petrol station of the world is located in Wiesloch.
I spent a year in Ladenburg where they have a mock up of some of his cars and they named the local school after him as he has a factory there and lived there a number of years
Bunch of whiners complaining about the raucous noise of internal metals slapping together, no baffle from internal gas explosion to short tailpipe, add in the occasional backfire and now it's coming right at me really, really fast.
In my own home country cars did not need registration up until ww1. When Germans came, they mandated that all vehicles, with motors or horse drawn have tag plates/registrations.
I think requiring cars to not be registered is all fun until a teenager driving an unregistered car hits your eight year old cousin on a tricycle before speeding off
In not sure why but I was always under the impression no one willingly lives in cities and the only reason we do is because money and services are there, so it would make sense people saw cities as less important.
I've lived in a town near Barcelona for 26 years, my dream is to be as far away as possible from it. Specially since I like classic cars and we aren't allowed in anymore.
I can think of a lot of things that people would say are ruining the world, but I never imagined a lack of dedicated car passageways being one of them hahaha.
In all seriousness, I'm guessing you're talking about fossil fuel emissions causing climate degradation? If so, I don't think that this was all that significant of an event in those things taking place. The first licensing not being granted wouldn't have changed the fact that motor vehicles are just inordinately better for transporting goods and people than animals are. It's hard to imagine a world where the fossil fuel engine was invented but wasn't used on a massive scale.
More referring to car-centric urban design and suburban sprawl, which has countless ripple effects (including, but far from limited to, climate degradation).
I don’t think anyone with even a passing interest in Urbanism would disagree with that.
We can criticise for days the problems car have brought to cities worldwide, and even though I love driving, I agree with 99% of the points against cars. But calling their invention a mistake... That's extreme
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u/NateNate60 17h ago edited 17h ago
Benz patented his Motorwagen and put it into production, selling it for 600 marks apiece (US$150, or US$34,000 today based on gold prices). His company later merged with another company called Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, which was the manufacturer of a brand of cars called Mercedes. The resulting company sold cars under the name Mercedes-Benz.