The history
250 years from a smoky steam wagon in Paris to the electric cars that now make up one in four new cars sold.
For thousands of years, land travel meant walking or being pulled by an animal. Then inventors learned to burn fuel inside a cylinder and turn each small explosion into spinning wheels. In 1886 Karl Benz patented a motor car, Bertha Benz proved it could travel, and Henry Ford made cars cheap enough for millions. Since then cars have become safer and cleaner, and now the electric car that lost the race around 1910 is winning it back.
1769–1770
Full-size self-propelled road vehicle
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, France
1807–1808
Vehicle with an internal combustion engine
François Isaac de Rivaz, Switzerland (attributed)
1876
Practical four-stroke engine
Nicolaus Otto, Germany
1886
Patented petrol motor car
Karl Benz, Germany
1888
Long-distance car journey
Bertha Benz, Germany
1899
Car faster than 100 km/h
Camille Jenatzy, Belgium (electric)
1939
Mass-produced fully automatic transmission
General Motors Hydra-Matic, USA
1959
Three-point seat belt in production cars
Nils Bohlin and Volvo, Sweden
1997
Mass-produced hybrid car
Toyota Prius, Japan
1769 – 1885
Inventors try steam, hydrogen and coal gas to move a carriage without a horse, and Nicolaus Otto finds the four-stroke rhythm that most engines still use.
1770
1769–1770
Cugnot, a French army engineer, built a three-wheeled steam wagon called a fardier to haul heavy cannons. He tested a small version in 1769 and a full-size one in 1770. It crawled along at walking pace and had to stop about every fifteen minutes to build up steam again.
Why it mattered. It is widely considered the first full-size vehicle to move under its own power, and the 1770 machine still stands in a Paris museum.
1807
1807–1808
De Rivaz built an engine that burned a mix of hydrogen and oxygen, set off by an electric spark, and patented it in France in 1807. A year later he put it on a small cart. It had no compression and no crankshaft, so it was very weak.
Why it mattered. It is often called the first vehicle driven by an internal combustion engine, where the fuel burns inside the engine itself.
1860
1860 and 1863
Lenoir, born in what is now Belgium, patented an engine in 1860 that burned coal gas and air, lit by electric sparks. Hundreds were sold to power workshops. In 1863 he fitted one to a three-wheeled carriage, the Hippomobile, and drove it about 11 km from Paris to Joinville-le-Pont.
Why it mattered. It was the first internal combustion engine to sell in large numbers, and its spark ignition lives on in every petrol engine.
1876
1876 (patent 1877)
Otto's company Deutz ran a new engine in 1876 that worked in four strokes: draw in fuel and air, squeeze it, burn it, push out the exhaust. Squeezing the mixture first made it far stronger and smoother than older gas engines. German patent DRP 532 followed on 4 August 1877, though a Frenchman, Alphonse Beau de Rochas, had described the idea in 1862.
Why it mattered. Almost every petrol car engine still runs on Otto's four-stroke cycle.
1885 – 1908
Benz and Daimler build the first petrol cars in Germany. Steam, electric and petrol cars all compete, and an electric car is the first to pass 100 km/h.
1885
1885–1886
After leaving Deutz, Daimler and Maybach built a light, fast-running petrol engine nicknamed the ‘grandfather clock’. In 1885 they put it on a wooden two-wheeler, the Reitwagen, often called the first motorcycle. In 1886 they fitted a stronger version to a horse carriage, making one of the first four-wheeled motor cars.
Why it mattered. Their small high-speed engine showed that petrol engines could be light enough to power almost anything.
1886
29 January 1886
Benz applied for German patent number 37435 for a ‘vehicle powered by a gas engine’. His Patent-Motorwagen had three wheels, a single-cylinder petrol engine at the back, electric ignition and a chain drive. Unlike earlier attempts, the engine and the carriage were designed together as one machine.
Why it mattered. The Mercedes-Benz Group calls this patent the birth certificate of the automobile.
1888
August 1888
Without telling her husband Karl, Bertha Benz drove the Motorwagen about 106 km to her mother's town, with her two teenage sons. She bought fuel at a pharmacy in Wiesloch, cleared a blocked fuel line with her hatpin, and had a cobbler fit leather to the brakes. On steep hills the boys had to push, because the car's two gears were not low enough.
Why it mattered. Her trip showed the public that a motor car really worked, and helped bring the Benz company its first sales.
1893
1892–1897
Diesel, born in Paris to German parents, patented an engine that squeezes air so hard it gets hot enough to light the fuel by itself. His German patent dates from 1892–1893. After years of work at the Augsburg machine works, a test engine ran successfully in 1897.
Why it mattered. Diesel engines are very efficient and still move most of the world's trucks, ships and trains.
1899
29 April or 1 May 1899
The Belgian driver Camille Jenatzy built a bullet-shaped electric car called La Jamais Contente, ‘The Never Satisfied’. Two electric motors pushed it to about 105.9 km/h. Sources disagree on whether the record run was on 29 April or 1 May.
Why it mattered. It was the first road vehicle to go faster than 100 km/h, proof that electric cars were once the speed kings.
1900
c. 1900
Around 1900, electric cars made up about a third of the vehicles on American roads. They were quiet, clean and easy to start, with no crank and no gear changes. But their batteries were heavy and ran out quickly, so they suited short trips in town.
Why it mattered. Cheap petrol, better roads and the electric starter soon pushed electric cars aside for almost a century.
1901
The businessman Emil Jellinek ordered a new racing car from the Daimler company and asked for it to carry his daughter's name, Mercedes. Maybach's Mercedes 35 hp was long and low, with a light engine at the front and a honeycomb radiator. It won races at Nice week in March 1901.
Why it mattered. It is widely considered the first modern car, the layout that replaced the ‘horseless carriage’.
1903
10 November 1903
Riding a streetcar in snowy New York, Mary Anderson watched the driver keep reaching out to clear the glass. She designed a hand-operated arm with a rubber blade that swept the windscreen from inside, and received US patent 743,801. She never earned money from it, and her patent ran out in 1920.
Why it mattered. Windscreen wipers became standard equipment, and she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011.
1908 – 1945
The Model T and the moving assembly line make cars cheap. The electric starter and the automatic gearbox make them easy to drive, and Japan starts building its own.
1908
1 October 1908
Ford introduced the Model T, a simple, tough car that ordinary families could fix themselves. The touring car first cost $850. Ford kept making it cheaper, and more than 15 million were built by 1927.
Why it mattered. It turned the car from a toy for the rich into everyday transport for millions.
1912
1912 model year
Starting an engine used to mean turning a heavy crank by hand, and a kickback could break an arm. Kettering's company Delco built an electric system that started the engine, made the spark and powered the lights. Cadillac ordered 12,000 for its 1912 cars.
Why it mattered. Anyone could now start a petrol car with the press of a button, which removed a big advantage of electric cars.
1913
At its Highland Park plant, Ford started moving each car past the workers instead of the workers walking to the car, first with ropes and then with a chain. Building a Model T fell from about 12 hours to about an hour and a half. The price kept dropping as output soared.
Why it mattered. Mass production changed not just cars but how almost everything is made.
1936
1936–1937
Kiichiro Toyoda, son of a loom inventor, started a car department inside his family's weaving-machine company. Its first passenger car, the Model AA, was shown in 1936. In August 1937 the department became the Toyota Motor Company.
Why it mattered. Toyota grew into one of the world's biggest carmakers and later built the first mass-produced hybrid.
1939
1939 (1940 model year)
General Motors engineers built the Hydra-Matic, which used oil in a fluid coupling and three sets of planetary gears to pick among four forward speeds on its own. Oldsmobile offered it in 1939 on its 1940 cars.
Why it mattered. It was the first mass-produced fully automatic transmission for passenger cars.
By the numbers
The list price of a Model T runabout: mass production cut it by more than two thirds, apart from a jump during the First World War.
1945 – 1997
People's cars fill roads worldwide. Seat belts save lives, oil shocks demand thriftier engines, and catalytic converters and cleaner fuel cut pollution.
1945
1938, mass production from 1945
The Beetle was designed in the 1930s as a cheap ‘people's car’, but war stopped production. From 1945 a British officer, Major Ivan Hirst, helped restart the factory. The Beetle was later built in about twenty countries, and the last one rolled out in Puebla, Mexico, on 30 July 2003.
Why it mattered. With 21,529,464 built, it is the best-selling car ever made on a single design.
1954
February 1954
The Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, shown in New York in 1954, sprayed petrol directly into each cylinder with a Bosch mechanical pump, instead of mixing it in a carburettor. It was one of the first cars to do this. Its gull-wing doors made it famous too.
Why it mattered. Precise fuel injection, now controlled by computers, is how nearly every modern engine is fed.
1959
Nils Bohlin, who had designed ejection seats for Saab jets, joined Volvo and created a belt that holds both the hips and the chest, clipped in with one hand. Volvo fitted it to its cars in 1959. It then left the patent open so every carmaker could use the design for free.
Why it mattered. The three-point belt is credited with saving at least a million lives, more than any other car safety invention.
1972
11 October 1972
Honda announced its CVCC engine, which lit a rich mixture in a small side chamber so the flame spread through a leaner mixture in the main cylinder. It burned fuel more completely. It met strict new US clean-air limits without a catalytic converter.
Why it mattered. Small, thrifty Japanese cars won millions of new buyers just as fuel suddenly became expensive.
1973
1973 and 1979
In October 1973 Arab oil producers cut supplies to several countries, and the world oil price jumped from about $3 to nearly $12 a barrel. Queues formed at petrol stations. A second shock followed the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Why it mattered. Governments set fuel-economy rules, and carmakers raced to build smaller, lighter, more efficient cars.
1975
1975 model year
To meet clean-air rules, most new petrol cars in the United States from the 1975 model year had a catalytic converter in the exhaust. Precious metals inside turn poisonous gases into less harmful ones. Lead in petrol ruins the catalyst, so unleaded petrol spread alongside it.
Why it mattered. It sharply cut the smog made by car exhausts, and cars around the world now carry one.
1997 – today
Hybrids and lithium-ion batteries bring electric drive back. China becomes the biggest car market, and by 2025 one new car in four is electric.
1997
10 December 1997
Toyota put the Prius on sale in Japan, with the tagline ‘Just in time for the 21st century’. It paired a petrol engine with an electric motor and a battery that recharged as the car slowed. It went on sale worldwide in 2000.
Why it mattered. It was the world's first mass-produced hybrid car and brought electric drive back into ordinary cars.
2008
February 2008
Tesla delivered its first Roadster, a sports car powered by 6,831 small lithium-ion cells like those in laptops, with an official range of 244 miles. Only about 2,450 were built. In June 2012 Tesla began delivering the Model S, a family car with software updates sent over the air.
Why it mattered. They showed that an electric car could be fast, go far on a charge and be something people wanted.
2008
10 January 2008
At the Auto Expo in New Delhi, Ratan Tata drove the tiny Tata Nano onto the stage. Its price was one lakh rupees, then about US$2,500, so that families of four who rode together on one motorbike could afford a car. Deliveries began in 2009.
Why it mattered. It became a symbol of the push to make cars affordable for hundreds of millions of new drivers in Asia.
2009
In 2009 China sold about 13.6 million vehicles, overtaking the United States as the largest car market in the world. The US had held that title since the days of the Model T. China has stayed number one ever since.
Why it mattered. The centre of the car world began to shift to Asia, and China went on to lead the electric car boom.
2021
July–August 2021
In 1921 Kettering's team found that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol stopped engines from knocking, and leaded petrol spread around the world. Lead is a poison, especially for children's brains. After a 19-year UN campaign, Algeria, the last country selling it, stopped in July 2021.
Why it mattered. The UN estimates the ban prevents more than 1.2 million early deaths a year.
2025
More than 20 million electric cars were sold in 2025, a quarter of all new cars, says the International Energy Agency. Six in ten were sold in China, where close to 55% of new cars were electric. China's BYD sold more fully electric cars than Tesla for the first time.
Why it mattered. Just over a century after it lost to petrol, the electric car is taking over again.
By the numbers
IEA figures for battery-electric and plug-in hybrid cars, from each year's Global EV Outlook: from about 1 in 40 new cars in 2019 to 1 in 4 in 2025.
Did you know?
The first car to go faster than 100 km/h, in 1899, was electric.
On the first long car journey in 1888, Bertha Benz bought her fuel at a pharmacy and cleared a blocked fuel line with her hatpin.
Volvo let every carmaker use its three-point seat belt design for free.
The Volkswagen Beetle overtook the Model T as the best-selling car on 17 February 1972, and 21,529,464 were built in all.
In 2025 close to 55% of new cars sold in China were electric.
The people
1832 – 1891 · Engine builder · Germany
Made the four-stroke engine work, the cycle most petrol engines still use.
1844 – 1929 · Engineer · Germany
Patented the first petrol motor car in 1886.
1849 – 1944 · Driver and business partner · Germany
Helped fund her husband's work and made the first long car journey in 1888.
1834 – 1900 · Engineer and industrialist · Germany
With Wilhelm Maybach, built the light, fast petrol engine that could power cars, boats and more.
1858 – 1913 · Engineer · France and Germany
Invented the engine that lights its fuel by squeezing air, with no spark.
1866 – 1953 · Inventor · USA
Patented a windscreen wiper in 1903 but never earned money from it.
1882 – 1922 · Racing driver and writer · England
Set a women's speed record of 90.88 mph in 1906 and advised drivers to carry a hand mirror to see behind them.
1863 – 1947 · Industrialist · USA
Made the Model T and the moving assembly line, putting cars within reach of ordinary families.
1894 – 1952 · Engineer and founder · Japan
Started the car business that became Toyota.
1920 – 2002 · Safety engineer · Sweden
Designed the three-point seat belt that Volvo gave to the world for free.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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