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Are the employees able to afford a Tesla? Or do they drive yugo's?

What's the relevance in that statement?

I think it's a fairly relevant question, actually, especially if you're familiar with the history of the automobile industry. Now, it's not true that Ford specifically wanted to profit from his employees buying his cars, but he did say this:

"I will build a motor car for the great multitude...constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise...so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one-and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."

Ford doubled salaries in his plants at one point to increase employee retention, which did in fact improve worker's pay to what one might have called "a good salary" — he could afford to buy a Ford with just four months' pay. Ford became tightly dialed in on this subject and saw clearly the value of paying an employee a living wage:

"No one loses anything by raising wages as soon as he is able. It has always paid us. Low wages are the most costly any employer can pay. It is like using low-grade material--the waste makes it very expensive in the end. There is no economy in cheap labor or cheap material."

Or uh, how about this one?

"You can't tell me you can make any system or country work with low wages and high prices, and high wages with high prices don't mean anything when the prices eat up the wages and don't leave anything over."

So yeah, it's an entirely reasonable question.

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse"

Too often, a quote is attributed to Ford simply because its touches upon success in business or innovation: He has become a patron saint of the entrepreneur... One of the more popular of these quotations is, ''If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse,'' which has never been satisfactorily traced to Henry Ford. In fact, the quote only begins to appear in the early 21st century, ''quoted'' by modern-day business gurus using it as an object lesson.

Henry Ford's quotations

What people wanted was clean, affordable. mechanical horse power.

The carriage without the horse. The barn. The stable-boy. The veterinarian. The manure pit.

Really? Aluminum, in 2013, how old school can one get?

I'm holding out for the FORD Dreamliner truck, that will be impressive.

FORD used to be an innovator making plastic parts for automobiles in the early 1940s, then the bean counters took power and killed it all.

The Smithsonian used to be hard core, back when they were in the Arts and Industries building. The assumption was that visitors knew something about the subject and were there to see the historic original.

Placing technology in its historical and social context is part of the job of the modern museum.

Rosa Parks Bus. Driving America

How much can you learn from a static display ---- how much more from the dynamic?

John Bull: Riding the Rails

The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan has a large variety of automobile, historical, and industrial/manufacturing exhibits. http://www.thehenryford.org/

I'll take Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House instead.

Following the advice of a lawyer or politician may not always be good, but I'm certain we all need food.

http://www.thehenryford.org/village/workingfarms/d efault.asp