Originally posted by Hudson@May 28 2004, 04:34 AM
By the way, Mercedes-Benz only goes back about 3/4 of a century...only a couple of years YOUNGER than Lincoln.
:woot2:
Thank you!! Someone else in the world actually understands this!!
I get tired of hearing the claim that "Mercedes-Benz is the oldest car company in the world"--a dubious claim that I used to hear regularly on MB commercials a few years ago, but from which they seem to have backed off a bit.
The reason they make this claim is because the company that Karl Benz founded in 1883 (originally not a producer of cars) is not the same company as the merged Daimler/Benz entity that created Mercedes-Benz in 1926 to produce automobiles.
It wouldn't be unlike GM making a claim that it has been around since 1897--even though it wasn't created until 1908--on the basis that Oldsmobile, which GM acquired in 1908, was itself founded in 1897. Heck, you might as well say that Saturn has been around that long.
And if that weren't enough, the claim that "Mercedes-Benz invented the automobile" really gets under my skin. Not only is it a patently false statement, it's a particularly obnoxious and arrogant claim. Even if one qualified the statement, i.e. "Mercedes-Benz invented the
modern automobile", it would still be a ridiculous statement--that is, unless "modern automobile" is defined as a 3-wheeled, tiller-driven vehicle.
I hate to give the French any great credit these days, but there were patented, gas-powered, four-wheeled, steering wheel driven automobiles in France and Belgium as early as 1862, significantly pre-dating the 1885 Benz carriage.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not anti-MB at all. As I mentioned earlier, MB is a truly admirable heritage, and today's Mercedes are fabulous automobiles even if competitive pressures have compromised on the lower end of the range. They don't need to resort to making such ridiculous claims to sell their cars.