Something you cannot afford to be without?

"You must move with the times" declares this advertisement for a Daimler '15' from 1933.

What's interesting about this advertisement is not just how technical advances such as automatic transmission were available back then, but it's very revealing about the inherent unsustainability of private motor transport.

As Daimler proudly declares in the advert, they foresaw the burden of "negotiating crowded cities" with motor vehicles "over five years ago", i.e. the mid-1920s.

In the mid-1920s the era of the car had hardly begun! Although there was a burgeoning market in car ownership, mass car ownership wouldn't be a reality until at least the post-war boom of the 1950s. And formal recognition of the problems arising from mass motoring had yet to appear, some 40 years later, in the form of the seminal study 'Traffic in Towns' by Prof. Sir Colin Buchanan in 1963.

Modern traffic conditions have produced a tendency for motoring to become a burden than a pleasure - particularly in negotiating crowded cities

It's almost as if it only takes a small affluent section of society owning a car to cause problems, that it only takes a relatively small percentage of car ownership amongst the populace for the problems associated with traffic, that we're all too familiar with today, to manifest themselves.

Daimler's technical innovation allows you to happily "crawl" through the traffic - oh what joy! And with "Triplex glass throughout", maybe you could watch those poor souls still on bicycles whizz past, out of your saloon car window. You'd be going slow enough to see them.