To be clear, Henry Ford was a great innovator in production and assembly techniques, but Karl Benz created the first automobile 23 years before the Model T. I suspect what Ford heard was, "I want an automobile." He figured out how to do that cheaply and on a large scale.
Benz created the first production automobile in 1888, 3 years after his (and, respectively, Daimler's and Maybach's) first automobile, and 20 years before the first production Model T was built at the Piquette Plant on September 27, 1908.
No, stop. It is important to be able to object precisely and factually. It is trivial to look up information, and leaving misinformation in a comment because you can't be bothered to check the Wikipedia articel is as jarring as that typo I didn't bother to correct a few words ago.
I don't disagree with the statement that Henry Ford gave the public the automobile (instead of merely a better horse). I agree with your analogy (as long as "faster" can be replaced with "better" -- since horse-based transport had other problems besides merely being slow). My understanding is that all other efforts, around that time, toward automobile production fucused on charging as much as possible per unit, and limiting production toward that end. Even Ford's early investors felt that that was the only profitable way forward, and he had to fight to get them to agree to do the opposite -- minimize price and maximize production.
Henry Ford, more than any other individual, replaced America's, and the world's, horses with the automobile. (I use Ford's 1922 book My Life and Work as reference for these statements. http://www.google.com/search?q=ford+my+life+and+work)
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And while we are on the subject of analogies, we might mention Sony which, in 1983, instead of giving the world a better analog phonograph player, gave the world the Compact Disc player.
