No proof Henry Ford said if he'd asked what customers wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'

For years, social media users have claimed the founder of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, once said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses," presumably in reference to his early days establishing the manufacturing company at the start of the 20th century.

Social media users have shared the attribution on platforms including X, Reddit, Goodreads and Facebook (archived, archived).

There is no firsthand evidence to confirm or disprove whether Ford, who is widely credited for transforming the automotive industry by developing a moving assembly line and mass production techniques, ever uttered the famous quote. Such proof could include a written document by him or recorded speech.

Rather, no source in Google's newspaper archives or book archives supports the claim. Furthermore, the quote doesn't appear in Ford's autobiography and isn't included in a database of around 200 authenticated Ford quotations published by the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation.

We reached out to the museum, asking whether the alleged quote was on its radar. A representative responded via email, saying the center no longer verifies quotes widely credited to the industrialist, writing:

In the past, research on this topic has not yielded satisfactory results either for the researcher or the research staff. Ford was quoted in numerous articles for a variety of periodicals and newspapers and the quotes attributed to him were varied and often cannot be substantiated.

We also reached out to Ford Motor Company to ask whether it had any information about the alleged quote. We have not received a response, and we will update this report if that changes.

The alleged quote's history

Only secondhand sources have repeated the quote with Ford's attribution. Namely, they include authors and a relative of Ford who say the phrase originates with him without providing evidence to substantiate that claim. The Quote Investigator website, which publishes articles on the validity of quotes' attributions, reported that the earliest instance of Ford's name being linked to such a quote was in the 1999 edition of "The Cruise Industry News Quarterly," a magazine of cruise industry news. Snopes was unable to obtain a copy of the document for independent verification, but Quote Investigator reports it features an excerpt from cruise ship designer John McNeece which reads (emphasis ours):

There is a problem trying to figure out what people want by canvassing them. I mean, if Henry Ford canvassed people on whether or not he should build a motor car, they'd probably tell him what they really wanted was a faster horse.

Roughly two years after McNeece's words were published, the quote appeared again in print, this time attributed to Ford. In 2001, the website of the media brand MarketingWeek published a letter from David Lowings, who was then chief executive of a company called 42 Consulting. It reads: 

Being market-led implies being led by the consumer – and consumers are bad at coming up with innovations (Henry Ford's quote: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse" springs to mind…)

The 2002 book "Beyond Disruption: Changing the Rules in the Marketplace" by Jean-Marie Dru, also linked the quote to Ford.

In 2003, a slightly different version of the alleged quote with Ford's attribution surfaced in Mark Sherrinton's book "Added Value: The Alchemy of Brand-led Growth." That shorter version read, "If I'd listened to my consumers, I'd have given them a faster horse."

(Mark Sherrington)

(Mark Sherrington)

According to a 2006 article by Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, Ford's great-grandson William Clay Ford Jr. attributed the quote to his great-grandfather. During a news conference in Detroit, the newspaper reported that Ford Jr., executive chairman of Ford, said: 

My great-grandfather once said of the first car he ever built: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."

In our request to Ford Motor Company, we asked to connect with Ford Jr., specifically, to learn why he believed his great-grandfather said the quote. We will update this story if we hear back.

As stated in an article by the Harvard Business Review, the quote also appeared in 2018's "Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals," which is an assortment of papers written by various experts and edited by John Krumm.

(John Krumm)

The Google Books version of "Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals" credited author Anne Jardim's book from 1970, "The First Henry Ford: A Study in Personality and Business." However, a search of "faster horse" in Jardim's book on Google Books turned up no results for the "faster horse" quote. We contacted John Krumm for comment.

An article by the MarketingWeek website also attributed the quote in 2019, tying it to Helen Normoyle, who was the marketing director of the British pharmacy chain Boots at the time:

"If I'd listened to my customers, I'd have given them a faster horse." These are the words of Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motors, and it's a motto Boots marketing director Helen Normoyle stands by.

As reported by Quote Investigator, the quote was circulated in various forms without a link to Ford.

Historian and architecture critic Lewis Mumford wrote in 1946 in "The Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics": 

By the same token people who sought to improve transporation should have devoted themselves to breeding faster horses, rather than inventing railroads, motor cars, or airplanes.

While in 1971, an excerpt written by D.E. Berlyne featured in a report called "The role of research in educational change" by Alfred Yates. It read:

If somebody had been asked to do research about the year 1800 into how transportation could be improved, what would he have done? He might have looked for some improved diet that would give horses greater stamina. He might have sought some way of breeding faster horses.