Take a moment and celebrate: 122 years ago Karl Benz applied for a patent for his "vehicle with gas engine operation". The automobile, as we know it, was born.
Imagine life without your car or truck. If it's not used for the daily commute, it's a shopping basket, transport for a sporting team, a convenient Sunday afternoon ride to the movies, a home away from home during the holidays, an object of desire. The automobile has changed our lives, and shaped our cities. The automobile become part of popular culture in a way no other machine or consumer item ever has. They don't write songs about lawnmowers; you don't see too many washing machine museums; few people talk about microwave ovens at parties. The auto industry is the world's single largest manufacturing activity, and despite crowded roads and growing environmental pressures, our desire for more new cars and trucks seems almost insatiable.
Why? Well, from the moment Henry Ford put the world on wheels with his affordable, ubiquitous Model T, the car became a potent symbol of freedom. We are the most mobile humans that ever lived; we can jump in our cars, and pretty much go where we want, when we want. For most of our history that has been the rare privilege of kings and queens.
I'd never thought about the automobile that way until I was interviewing the chairman of Volvo, Pehr Gyllenhammar, in the early 90s. "You know," he said, "if the car was invented today, governments would not allow ordinary people to use it."
Gyllenhammar's words came rushing back to me as I watched the citizens of the former East Germany spend their carefully hoarded hard currency on a car -- any car -- in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I suddenly realized they weren't just buying a mechanical device. They were buying their freedom.
So, happy birthday to our magnificent obsession, the machine that changed the world.
