Mr. Obama: Meet Mr. Benz, not Mr. Ford.

Depending how technical you want to get (and you seem to be looking to be looking for a high level of technicality)... you might want to do some research on Nicolas Cugnot.

From Kiley: I will...just like their is some dispute on who invented baseball, the zipper and the telephone, there are disputed here. But no historian I know posits that the car was invented in the U.S.

Knit picking at it's best. The point being that the American automobile industry has been the core of automobile production since 1900. That's close enough to the beginining for me.
We should be proud of what this country and our auto industry has achieved and we should do everything that we can to preserve it.

Nice catch.

You'd think that Mr. Obama's staff would check out his speech in its entirety, even on so minor a part as this.

>>> So much for Obama’s popularity in Germany.

Somehow I think at this point Germany is more interested in the particulars of Detroit's current troubles (ex: potential closing of Opel plant(s) in Germany) and the impact of the bailout (is it somehow anti-competitive?) than this misstatement.

I hope the people he has appointed to "save" the American automobile industry have a deeper knowledge of the business and a better command of the facts.

OK folks. Lets get to the REAL problem with the economy. The unions which practice extortion have driven the industry into the ground, demanding more and more in return for less and less.

No harm done. We still love him.

Still the basic ideas came from France.

As mentioned above the article writer is really no more correct than Obama. It depends on what criteria you are using to define automobile and what you consider "inventing the automobile."

What Benz invented was a gasoline powered three wheeled vehicle. There were similar steam and electric powered vehicles invented first.

Americans Charles and Frank Duryea actually invented the first vehicle we would refer to as a car. They also set up the first American auto manufacturing company.

Henry Ford then brought the car to the masses by making it affordable through his production methods and the Ford Motor Company refined the car into something much more like today's car.

So when we are talking about who invented the automobile what do we mean by automobile. A self propelled carriage? In that case it would likely be Frenchman Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot. Do we mean gasoline powered carriage? Then Benz would be correct. Do we mean four wheeled gas powered car? Then it is actually Americans.

Hopefully those guys that undertake this task of saving the auto industry understand what the unions have done to the productivity and effectiveness of the auto manufacturers. -Carl, MotorInsuranceAmerica.com

Kiley: What's your point? productivity and quality at the plant level is very good...darn near parity with the Japanese.