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The First Cars

The very first self-propelled car was built in 1769, when Nicolas Cugnot, a French military engineer, designed a steam powered road-vehicle. The vehicle was built at the Paris Arsenal, and was used by the French Army to move cannons. It had three wheels with the engine in the front along with the boiler. While Cugnot's 'car' could travel at 6 kms/hour! (Still, it was far too heavy and slow to be of practical use.)

It was over a hundred years later, in 1885, that Karl Benz came up with something more like the modern car. It used an internal combustion engine run on petrol, rather than steam.