Car
There are over 1.6 billion cars in use worldwide as of 2025, and the count is still climbing fast. A car is a motor vehicle with wheels that runs primarily on roads, seats one to eight people, and carries passengers rather than cargo. Most have four wheels. That simple description hides a long argument over who built the first one, and an even longer reckoning with what the machine has done to the planet and to the people who depend on it.
The questions stack up quickly. Who actually deserves credit for the first practical automobile, when steam, electricity, and petrol all competed for decades? How did a vehicle that replaced horse-drawn carriages reshape cities, families, and the air we breathe? And why is the shift away from fossil fuels now treated as central to slowing climate change? The answers begin with a clockwork carriage and a 65-centimetre toy built for an emperor.
Hans Hautsch of Nuremberg built a clockwork-driven carriage in 1649, long before anyone spoke of automobiles. Around 1672, Ferdinand Verbiest, a Flemish member of a Jesuit mission in China, designed the first steam-powered vehicle as a 65 cm scale-model toy for the Kangxi Emperor. It could carry neither driver nor passenger, and it is not known with certainty whether it was ever built or run.
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot is widely credited with the first full-scale, self-propelled mechanical vehicle, a steam-powered tricycle, in about 1769. He also built two steam tractors for the French Army, one of which survives in the French National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. His machines struggled with water supply and steam pressure. In 1801, Richard Trevithick demonstrated his Puffing Devil road locomotive, often called the first showing of a steam road vehicle, though it could not hold steam pressure for long.
Internal combustion arrived through a series of near-misses. In 1807, Nicephore Niepce and his brother Claude built what was probably the world's first internal combustion engine, the Pyreolophore, but fitted it to a boat on the river Saone. It ran on Lycopodium powder, crushed coal dust, and resin mixed with oil. That same year the Swiss inventor Francois Isaac de Rivaz used his own engine, fuelled by hydrogen and oxygen, to power the first vehicle of its kind. Samuel Brown, Samuel Morey, and Etienne Lenoir each tried too, mostly with adapted carriages, and none succeeded. The breakthrough would belong to a German with a patent.
On the 29th of January 1886, Carl Benz applied for a patent on his motor vehicle, and it was granted on the 2nd of November that year. He had been granted a patent for a stationary engine in 1879, dreamed of a horseless carriage, and started work in 1884. In 1885 he produced his first prototype, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen Nr. 1. Confident in it, he drove into Mannheim and had the vehicle written up in the Neue Badische Landeszeitung of the 4th of June 1886. Many historians treat that 1886 patent as the birth of the modern car.
The early production numbers were tiny. Benz's first production car, the Patent-Motorwagen Model 2, was made in single-digit numbers in 1887-88. The Frenchman Emile Roger, already building Benz engines under license, added the car to his line in 1888, and perhaps 60 of the Model 3 were produced between 1889 and 1893, mostly assembled in Paris from kits. In August 1888, Bertha Benz, Carl's wife and business partner, made the first road trip by an internal combustion engine car to prove her husband's invention was roadworthy.
Benz kept inventing. In 1896 he designed and patented the first internal-combustion flat engine, the boxermotor. By 1899, Benz was the largest car company in the world with 572 units produced, and Benz and Cie. became a joint-stock company because of its size. Meanwhile other Germans worked in parallel: Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach founded Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft in Cannstatt in 1890 and sold their first car in 1892. After Daimler died in 1900, Maybach designed an engine for Emil Jellinek, and in 1902 a new model generating 35 hp was named Mercedes after it.
Ford's cars came off the line at 15-minute intervals, faster than anything before, cutting assembly from 12.5 manhours to 1 hour and 33 minutes. Henry Ford launched the world's first moving assembly line for cars in 1913 at the Highland Park Ford Plant, expanding on ideas Ransom Olds had used in 1901 at his Oldsmobile factory in Lansing, Michigan. The roots ran back to Marc Isambard Brunel at the Portsmouth Block Mills in 1802 and Thomas Blanchard at the Springfield Armory in 1821.
The speed created its own problems. Paint became a bottleneck because only Japan black dried fast enough, so Ford dropped its colour range until fast-drying Duco lacquer arrived in 1926. That constraint is the source of Ford's apocryphal line, "any color as long as it's black". In 1914, an assembly line worker could buy a Model T with four months' pay. Ford's safety rules, especially fixing each worker to one spot, sharply cut injuries, and the pairing of high wages with high efficiency became known as Fordism.
The method spread or it killed you. Ford France and Ford Britain were founded in 1911, Ford Denmark in 1923, and Ford Germany in 1925, while Citroen became the first native European maker to adopt the line in 1921. By 1930, 250 companies without assembly lines had vanished. Charles Kettering's electric ignition and electric self-starter reached the Cadillac Motor Company in 1910-1911. Alfred P. Sloan built the General Motors Companion Make Program so buyers could move up as their fortunes improved.
Of some two hundred American car makers alive in 1920, only 43 survived to 1930, and after the Great Depression just 17 remained by 1940. Names like Apperson, Cole, Dorris, Haynes, and Premier could not manage the costs, even with decades of production behind them. Sharing parts kept the survivors alive: in the 1930s LaSalles sold by Cadillac used cheaper Oldsmobile mechanicals, in the 1950s Chevrolet shared bonnet, doors, roof, and windows with Pontiac, and by the 1990s shared platforms were common.
Europe consolidated the same way. Morris set up its line at Cowley in 1924, soon outsold Ford, and pursued vertical integration from 1923, buying engine, gearbox, and radiator suppliers and rivals like Wolseley; by 1925 Morris held 41 per cent of British car production. Citroen came to cars in 1919, and with Renault's 10CV and Peugeot's 5CV they produced 550,000 cars in 1925. Germany's first mass-manufactured car, the Opel 4PS Laubfrosch, or Tree Frog, came off the line at Russelsheim in 1924 and took 37.5 per cent of the German market.
Japan started small and late. Before World War II only a handful of firms built vehicles, often three-wheelers like Daihatsu or partnership models, such as Isuzu's Wolseley A-9 in 1922 and the Fiat-based Mitsubishi Model A. Toyota, Nissan, Suzuki, Mazda, and Honda all began making non-automotive products and switched to cars in the 1950s. Kiichiro Toyoda's choice to take Toyoda Loom Works into car manufacturing led to Toyota Motor Corporation, now the world's largest automobile manufacturer.
Traffic collisions are the largest cause of injury-related deaths worldwide. Mary Ward became one of the first documented car fatalities in 1869 in Parsonstown, Ireland, and Henry Bliss was one of the first US pedestrian casualties in 1899 in New York City. New cars now face standard safety tests like the Euro and US NCAP programmes and checks by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, though not all of them weigh the safety of pedestrians and cyclists outside the car.
The environmental bill is steep. Cars and vans caused 10 per cent of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2022, and cars consumed almost a quarter of world oil production as of 2019. Air pollution from cars raises the risk of lung cancer and heart disease, harms pregnancies, and is linked in children to asthma, childhood cancer, and neurocognitive issues. Larger cars pollute more, and rising demand for SUVs is driving emissions up. Animals suffer too, killed as roadkill or cut off by habitat fragmentation, prompting green bridges and wildlife corridors in newer road designs.
The gains are real as well. Cars deliver on-demand transportation, mobility, independence, and convenience, plus job and wealth creation across the industry. In the 1920s they offered something else entirely: couples finally had a way to head off on unchaperoned dates and a private space to snuggle at the end of the night. That flexibility to move from place to place has far-reaching implications for the shape of whole societies.
As of 2025, one in four cars sold is electric, yet fewer than one in twenty cars on the world's roads were fully electric or plug-in hybrid by the end of 2024. Production of petrol-fuelled cars peaked in 2017. Electric cars, invented early in the history of the car, became commercially available in the 2000s and widespread in the 2020s, and over their lifetime they produce about half the emissions of diesel and petrol cars. Gustave Trouve had shown an electric three-wheeler back in November 1881 at the International Exposition of Electricity.
Governments are forcing the change. In July 2021 the European Commission introduced its Fit for 55 package, requiring all newly sold cars in the European market to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. Many countries plan to stop selling fossil cars between 2025 and 2050, Amsterdam is planning to ban them completely, and many Chinese cities limit licensing of fossil fuel cars. Lighter batteries, lithium iron phosphate chemistry, lidar sensors, and wireless charging are all advancing.
The industry itself is enormous and shifting. In 2020-56 million cars were made worldwide, down from 67 million the year before, with China producing 20 million and Japan seven million. Around 1.644 billion cars are in use as of January 2025, consuming about 50 EJ of energy yearly. Fully self-driving cars already operate as robotaxis in some places, waiting only for laws to catch up before they can spread.