Cars

From Cugnot's steam fardier to self-driving electric vehicles — two and a half centuries of the machine that reshaped how humans live, work, and move.

20 posts· 1769 – 1965

• Unsafe at Any Speed: Ralph Nader's indictment of the American car 1965
• BMC Mini: the box that rewired the small car 1959
• Citroën DS: the goddess at the 1955 Paris Motor Show 1955
• Michelin's flytrap: the tyre the industry couldn't copy 1948
• The 260 D: the first diesel passenger car 1936
• The car that erased its own chassis 1934
• Federal Aid Road Act: the law that fixed the mud 1916
• Ford's moving assembly line: 12.5 hours to 93 minutes 1913
• Ford Model T: the car for the great multitude 1908
• The Curved Dash Oldsmobile: America's first mass-produced car 1901
• Paris–Rouen, 1894: the race that decided what a car should be 1894
• The Duryea Motor Wagon: the first American gasoline automobile 1893
• Bertha Benz and the first road trip 1888
• Daimler's motor carriage: the first four-wheeled petrol vehicle, Bad Cannstatt, 1886 1886
• Benz Patent-Motorwagen: a wall in Mannheim and the birth certificate of the automobile 1885
• Lenoir's Hippomobile: eleven kilometres on a coal-gas engine 1863
• Hancock's Enterprise: London's first scheduled motor bus 1833
• De Rivaz's hydrogen carriage: the first internal-combustion automobile 1808
• Trevithick's Puffing Devil: up Camborne Hill on Christmas Eve 1801
• Cugnot's fardier: the first machine to move under its own power 1769