Early Mis-Prediction of the Demand for Automobiles
Upvote:0
I believe it was either Daimler or Benz before they were merged. The prediction was that the demand for cars would never exceed a certain number worldwide, and that number was very low, in the order of 10,000.
...
My guess is the prediction was made in the 1880s or 1890s, because by 1900 production numbers were picking up in several countries. Would anybody be able to point me to a source?
For Daimler this is unlikely, since already in 1886 he was planning the usage of his motors also for rail, boats and air.
This eventually lead to the 1909 slogan:
Mobility on land, on water and in the air
(source: daimler.com)
and the 3 pointed star logo (shown here in the 1913 ad).
The source below in any case doesn't mention any such prediction.
The merging of both companies took place in June 1926.
This quote is, indeed, attributed to Gottlieb Daimler.
Die weltweite Nachfrage nach Kraftfahrzeugen wird eine Million nicht überschreiten – allein schon aus Mangel an verfügbaren Chauffeuren.
The global demand for motor vehicles will not exceed one million - if only for the lack of available chauffeurs.
In most cases, no precise date, or place, is given. Sometimes the year 1901 is used.
Mostly it is given as a sample how predictions can go wrong, such as:
Kein Geringerer als Auto-Pionier Gottlieb Daimler ließ sich 1901 zu dieser Voraussage hinreißen.
Nobody less than the car pioneer Gottlieb Daimler allowed himself to be carried away to make this prediction in 1901.
But in this case Gottlieb Daimler isn't the only one to get things wrong.
Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler died on the 6th of March 1900.
One plausible explanation could be that Daimler simply thought that, in the long term, commercial (lorries/trucks, aviation, rail and boats/ships) usage may become more important than passenger cars.
Sources:
Upvote:8
It is a quote often attributed to Daimler:
Die weltweite Nachfrage nach Kraftfahrzeugen wird eine Million nicht überschreiten — allein schon aus Mangel an verfügbaren Chauffeuren.
~ Global demand for motor vehicles will not exceed one million — (if only because) simply for lack of available chauffeurs.
Quotes by Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler
The authenticity seems a little wobbly, but if a year is attached to this quote, it is 1901. Or even just 'around 1900'…
A variant of this tale is closer to what's presented in question and reads:
So Gottlieb Daimler um 1895: "Es werden höchstens 5000 Fahrzeuge gebaut werden. Denn es gibt nicht mehr Chauffeure, um sie zu steuern."
~ Gottlieb Daimler said around 1895: "At most 5000 vehicles will be built. Because there are not more chauffeurs to drive them."
While the question as posed is not directly about this angle: this anecdote seems to be in dire need of being treated as unreliable. So: this answers not the question about "who said it", but "who is said to have said it".
In fact after checking multiple biographies of either the person or 'the company', no mention of this peculiar quote is to be found in them.
The earliest mention I found 'on the net' was in Harvard Business Manager2/2000:
— Alexander Fink, Oliver Schlake & Andreas Siebe: "Wie Sie mit Szenarien die Zukunft vorausdenken. Was Szenarien für die Früherkennung leisten und wie sie konkrete Entscheidungen unterstützen", Harvard Business manager 2/2000 (20.01.2000).
And from there, if any kind of 'source' for this quotation is given, it mushrooms into 'scientific' literature as a reference. (example: — Andreas Zeller: "Technologiefrühaufklärung mit Data Mining: Informationsprozessorientierter Ansatz zur Identifikation schwacher Signale", Springer-Verlag, 2013, p3, gBooks. )
Nowhere is there any proper source attribution to be found for this, despite after 2000 countless examples of this quote float around everywhere. Other science media books give as a source an ominous market research study, made by the company Daimler in 1901. (example 1, and example 2 even combining the person Daimler and the company study, giving the Fink article as 'source'…)
A very nice conflation of attributions is also found in
A chasm situation related to cognitive barriers can be illustrated for the case of auto-mobiles by statements of Carl Benz or Gottlieb Daimler: “Due to the restricted availability of chauffeurs there will never be more than 5,000 automobiles” – “Global demand for motor vehicle will not exceed one million – simply due to the lack of available chauffeurs.”
— Wolfgang Runge: "Technology Entrepreneurship. A Treatise on Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship for and in Technology Ventures", KIT Scientific Publishing: Karlsruhe: 2014, p125/925
Highlighting that it really doesn't matter who this morality tale gets attached to, as long as it's from the horses mouth of a motor-vehicle pioneer himself. Needless to say that in this publication the references for these two 'tales as quotes' are merely two internet pages that are now long gone…
This may not be the end of it, since not everything is on the net, but one journalistic article seems to lay a certain groundwork for widespread copypasta of hearsay that attaches quite probably wrongly an easily identifiable mis-prediction to a person with date that makes this saying impossible to regard as true for the person and 1901.
It seems that this particular quote — regardless of variant, as long as it's attributed to Daimler and vaguely the same — is of a very late invention…
They are meant to illustrate how predictions can go wrong and did so in the past. But probably they illustrate much better how scientific rigor in writing and using quote material is going downhill now, faster than car sales it seems?
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