Automobile

The automobile is a usually four-wheeled vehicle designed primarily for passenger transportation, commonly propelled by an internal-combustion engine using a volatile fuel. As a machine, the modern automobile is a complex technical system employing subsystems with specific design functions, some of which consist of thousands of component parts that have evolved from breakthroughs in existing technology or from new technologies such as electronic computers, high-strength plastics, and new alloys of steel and nonferrous metals. Its presence is global in scale: over 1.6 billion cars were in use worldwide as of 2025.

An automobile is a motor vehicle that runs on wheels, and most definitions hold that cars operate primarily on roads, seat one to eight people, and carry four wheels. Its principal purpose is the transport of people rather than cargo. The modern car, understood as a practical and marketable automobile for everyday use, was invented in 1886 when the German inventor Carl Benz patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen.

The automobile was initially perfected in Germany and France toward the end of the nineteenth century by such men as Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz, Nicolaus Otto and Emile Levassor, although it was to have its greatest social and economic impact in the United States. All the early Benz cars used the same layout and belt-drive technology for which Benz received patent number DRP37435 in 1886 — hence the Patent-Motorwagen designation.

Long before the automobile took its modern form, inventors experimented with self-propelled road vehicles. In 1769 the French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built the first steam-powered road vehicle, a large three-wheeled dray designed to carry artillery pieces at walking pace. Steam remained the only practical motive force for such machines until the nineteenth century, when attention turned to burning fuel inside the engine itself.

The decisive figure in that transition was Nicolaus August Otto, the German engineer who developed the compressed charge internal combustion engine running on petroleum gas. In late autumn of 1860 Otto and his brother learned of a novel gas engine that Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir had built in Paris; the brothers built a copy and applied in January 1861 for a patent, though the application was rejected. Their persistence produced the Rings-Schumm engine, which appeared in autumn 1876 and was immediately successful as the first commercially successful engine to use in-cylinder compression. The term Otto cycle is now applied to all compressed charge four cycle engines.

Carl Benz built his first prototype car in 1885 in Mannheim and patented it in January 1886. The first modern car — a practical and marketable automobile for everyday use, and the first car in series production — appeared in 1886, when Benz developed a gasoline-powered automobile and made several identical copies. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen designation refers to the first cars produced by Benz & Cie between 1885 and 1893, with three wheels, a single-cylinder four-stroke engine and belt-drive. All early Benz cars used the same layout and belt-drive technology for which Benz received patent number DRP37435 in 1886.

The original Patent-Motorwagen was developed over 1884–1887 and is widely regarded as the first practical automobile. It was also the first car put into production, manufactured and sold between 1887 and 1893, while its engine's output was stabilised by a flywheel. By June 1886 Benz was driving around Mannheim in the Benz Patent-Motorwagen Nr.

In 1890 Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach formed Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft. In 1926 the company merged with Benz & Cie. to form Daimler-Benz, known for its Mercedes-Benz automobile brand.

In August 1888 Bertha Benz, without her husband's knowledge, set out with his motor car and her two sons Eugen and Richard in the direction of Pforzheim. After more than twelve hours of driving and over 100 kilometers on mostly unpaved roads they arrived in Pforzheim. The circumstances of this world's first long-distance journey in an automobile have gone down in the annals of automotive history.

The trip proved the motor car capable of extended travel from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back. Since 2008 a Bertha Benz Memorial Route commemorates the event.

Frank and Charles Duryea of Springfield, Massachusetts, designed the first successful American gasoline automobile in 1893; they won the first American car race in 1895 and made the first sale of an American-made gasoline car the next year.

Olds founded Oldsmobile in 1897 and introduced the Curved Dash Oldsmobile in 1901; his company pioneered the assembly line using identical, interchangeable parts and by 1903 had produced thousands of Oldsmobiles.

The curved-dash Oldsmobile sold for only $650 and so came within reach of middle-class Americans, and its 1904 output of 5,508 units surpassed any car production previously accomplished.

The 1901 Mercedes, designed by Wilhelm Maybach for Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, deserves credit as the first modern motorcar in all essentials: its thirty-five-horsepower engine weighed only fourteen pounds per horsepower and it achieved a top speed of fifty-three miles per hour.

The four-cylinder, twenty-horsepower Model T was first offered in October 1908 for $825, fitted with a two-speed planetary transmission that made it easy to drive, a detachable cylinder head that made it easy to repair, and a high chassis designed to clear the bumps in rural roads. In 1908, when he introduced the Model T, Henry Ford sold 5,986 touring cars at $850 each; by 1916 the moving assembly line had raised his output to 577,036 and reduced his price to $360; it later dropped to $260 in 1924, when production was well over the million mark. The first step in the evolution of moving-line production occurred in the spring of 1913, when a conveyor belt was installed for assembling flywheel magnetos and the average assembly time was cut from 20 to 5 minutes by using 29 workers, each of whom had one simple task to perform.

In 1914 the Ford Motor Company announced that it would henceforth pay eligible workers a minimum wage of $5 a day, compared to an average of $2.34 for the industry, and would reduce the work day from nine hours to eight, thereby converting the factory to a three-shift day. By the time the Model T was withdrawn from production in 1927 its price had been reduced to $290 for the coupe, 15 million units had been sold, and mass personal automobility had become a reality. By 1925 about three-quarters of all new American cars were bought on time through credit, and it was installment sales of automobiles during the twenties that established buying expensive consumer goods on credit as a middle-class habit.

The number of active automobile manufacturers in the United States fell from 253 in 1908 to only 44 in 1929, by which point about 80 percent of the industry's output was accounted for by Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.

General Motors, under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., innovated planned obsolescence of product in the 1920s and 1930s, introducing a largely cosmetic annual model change designed to make consumers trade in long before the useful life of their cars had ended.

The basic differences that distinguish post-World War II American cars from the Model T were in place by the late 1920s: the self-starter, the closed all-steel body, the high-compression engine, hydraulic brakes, syncromesh transmission and low-pressure balloon tires.

The era of the annually restyled road cruiser ended with the imposition of federal standards of automotive safety in 1966; emissions standards followed in 1965 and 1970; energy consumption rules came in 1975; and gasoline prices escalated after the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 during that decade. After peaking at a record 12.87 million units in 1978, sales of American-made cars fell to 6.95 million in 1982 as imports increased their share of the U.S. market from 17.7 percent to 27.9 percent. According to a study by Ward's Communications Incorporated, the average cost for a new American car increased $4,700 between 1980 and 2001 because of mandated safety and emission-control requirements such as the addition of air bags and catalytic converters, and prices increased by 29 percent between 2009 and 2019 according to the same source.

The automobile ended rural isolation and brought urban amenities, most important better medical care and schools, to rural America (while paradoxically the farm tractor made the traditional family farm obsolete). By 1980 some 87.2 percent of American households owned one or more motor vehicles, 51.5 percent owned more than one, and fully 95 percent of domestic car sales were for replacement. The construction of streets and highways, one of the largest items of government expenditure, peaked when the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 inaugurated the largest public works program in history.

Passenger cars have emerged as the primary means of family transportation, with an estimated 1.4 billion in operation worldwide; about one-quarter of these are in the United States, where more than three trillion miles are traveled each year. With some 70 million new units built each year worldwide, automobile manufacturers have been able to split the market into many very small segments that nonetheless remain profitable.

A diesel engine is an internal combustion engine in which ignition of diesel fuel is caused by the elevated temperature of the air in the cylinder due to mechanical compression, so it is also called a compression-ignition engine. Diesel's first prototype engine was built in Augsburg in 1893 and the first ignition took place on 10 August 1893 using petrol as the fuel. Moritz Schröter's test on 17 February 1897 was the main test of Diesel's engine, rating it 13.1 kW and an effective efficiency of 26.2 percent.

The first successful electric car in the United States made its debut around 1890 thanks to William Morrison, a chemist from Des Moines, Iowa, whose six-passenger vehicle reached a top speed of 14 miles per hour. By 1912 the gasoline car cost only $650 while an electric roadster sold for $1,750; that same year Charles Kettering introduced the electric starter, eliminating the need for the hand crank. Europe saw the strongest growth among major electric vehicle markets, with electric car sales rising by more than 30 percent to reach 28 percent of total sales following tighter European Union CO2 standards for cars.

The modern three-point safety belt was perfected by Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin in 1959, and its patent was given for free to the world; the invention has been credited with saving at least a million lives worldwide.

Approximately 1.16 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes, and road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5 to 29 years. More than half of all road traffic deaths are among vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, and road traffic crashes cost most countries 3 percent of their gross domestic product.

On an energy content basis, gasoline excluding fuel ethanol accounted for 52 percent of total energy consumption by the U.S. transportation sector in 2025, while distillate fuels accounted for 22 percent and jet fuel accounted for 13 percent.

The Clean Air Act 1970 authorized the establishment of National Ambient Air Quality Standards which State Implementation Plans had to achieve, and required control of motor vehicle emissions. The 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act of 1970 authorized programs for Acid Deposition Control and a program to control 189 toxic pollutants, and established permit program requirements.

The collections of the Deutsches Museum comprise over 125,000 objects, from the first automobile to the electron microscope. Valuable originals such as the Wright Brothers' first powered airplane, the U1 submarine, the diesel engine and the first program-controlled computer make the collection of the Deutsches Museum one of the most important scientific and technical collections in the world.

• 1672
  Verbiest's small-scale steam vehicle
  Ferdinand Verbiest created a small-scale steam-powered vehicle.^{7History of the automobile · Wikipedia ↗}
• 1769
  Cugnot's steam-powered automobile
  Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built the first steam-powered automobile capable of human transportation.^{7History of the automobile · Wikipedia ↗}
• 1890
  Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft formed
  Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach formed Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft.^{7History of the automobile · Wikipedia ↗}
• 1901
  The Mercedes
  Wilhelm Maybach designed the Mercedes for Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft; it is credited as the first modern motorcar in all essentials, with a thirty-five-horsepower engine weighing fourteen pounds per horsepower and a top speed of fifty-three miles per hour.^{3Automobile History · HISTORY (A&E Television Networks) ↗}
• 1926
  Daimler-Benz merger
  Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft merged with Benz & Cie. to form Daimler-Benz, known for its Mercedes-Benz automobile brand.^{7History of the automobile · Wikipedia ↗}