Some little known history for you ladies.

It's widely known that Karl Benz (which would become the Benz in Mercedes Benz) built the first true automobile. He called
it the Motorwagen.



But this is the "rest of the story"...

Benz's wife, Bertha, financed the development process of the Motorwagen, and would hold patent rights under modern law, but in 1886, as a married woman she was not allowed to apply for the patent.[1]

Historic drive of Bertha Benz

Bertha Benz, married to Karl, chose to publicize the Motorwagen in a unique manner: She took the Motorwagen, supposedly without her husband's knowledge, and drove it on the first long-distance automobile road trip to demonstrate its feasibility as a means to travel long distances.
That trip occurred in early August 1888, as the entrepreneurial lady took her sons Eugen and Richard, fifteen and fourteen years old, respectively, on a ride from Mannheim through Heidelberg, and Wiesloch (where she took on ligroin as a fuel at the city pharmacy, making it the first filling station in history), to her maternal hometown of Pforzheim.[2]
As well as being the driver, Benz acted as mechanic on the drive, cleaning the carburetor with her hat pin and using a garter to insulate a wire. She refueled at the local pharmacy in Wiesloch and as the brakes wore down, Benz asked a local shoemaker to nail leather on the brake blocks, in doing so, inventing brake lining on the way. After sending a telegram to her husband of the arrival in Pforzheim, she spent the night at her mother's house and returned home three days later. The trip covered 194 km (121 mi) in total.

In Germany, a parade of antique automobiles celebrates this historic trip of Bertha Benz every two years. In 2008, the Bertha Benz Memorial Route[3] was officially approved as a route of industrial heritage of mankind, because it follows Bertha Benz's tracks of the world's first long-distance journey by automobile in 1888.