The first road trip was a secret publicity stunt by Bertha Benz
In August 1888 Bertha Benz loaded her teenage sons Richard and Eugen into an experimental motor car and set off from Mannheim to Pforzheim, 106 kilometres away. She told people she was visiting her mother. Her husband Karl, the car's inventor, had not been told, and she was really out to prove his machine worked.
Until then the Benz car had only managed short test runs. Bertha's vehicle, the third experimental model, topped out at about 16 kilometres an hour, yet she reached Pforzheim and drove back again, completing the first long-distance journey by automobile anywhere. Publicity was precisely the point.
Stunts like that became a tradition. In 1899 the steam-car maker F. O. Stanley took his wife Flora up Mount Washington in New Hampshire to advertise it. The 12.2-kilometre climb took more than two hours, not counting stops to top up the water, and they came down in low gear with a great deal of braking.
The word driver is far older than the car. From the 15th century it meant someone who drove working animals such as pack horses, from a verb meaning to force something to move. Writers first applied it to electric railway operators in 1889 and to a motor-car driver in 1896, beating rivals such as motorneer and motor-man. French went with conducteur instead. In English, conductor had meant since the 1830s the person who looked after passengers and took fares, not the one at the controls. Oddly, the law still treats people steering a bicycle or a horse as drivers bound by the rules of the road.
Licensing rules differ widely. Australia makes new drivers display P plates, for provisional, while New Zealand calls the stage restricted. Owning a car requires no licence at all, and between 1993 and 1997 some 13.8 percent of drivers in fatal American crashes held none. One study found that drivers talking on a phone were more impaired than drunk ones once driving difficulty and time behind the wheel were accounted for.
Source: Driving
