Companies in the brewing industry were among the first to decide, on hard-headed and sober consideration, to embrace the motorised commercial vehicle and to use it as the backbone of a close-knit delivery system covering the whole of the German Empire. After all, people got just as thirsty in the more remote backwaters as in the big cities. Furthermore, the sooner the fruit of the hop could be supplied from the brewery to the pump the better, since beer doesn’t tend to improve with age.

To begin with however, motorised transport had to make its bid against stiff competition against horsepower of the more traditional kind. Painstaking economy comparisons are not an invention of our day and age and they soon made clear that the new form of transport had the competitive edge...