first cars

[Guest]

what was the name of the first cars and the dates they appeared?<BR>thanks==joe

[ply33]

The answers to your earlier post cover alot of ground. You might want to go back to <a href="http://www.aaca.org/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000946.html">the earlier post</a> and re-read the answers.<P>There were many, many cars built as experiments. A lot of those actually turned into low volume "production" cars. And a lot of the same people (at least in Detroit) moved from one company to another. All this makes it difficult, a hundred years removed, to exactly name the "first cars" and what dates they appeared.<P>There were also cars that were apparently never built but that gained large "mindshare" to use a modern term. The Sheldon comes to mind.<P>In general, Europe was ahead of the US in automobile development. The earliest internal combustion engine and the earliest "car" that used an internal combustion engine were both in Germany (Benz, now part of DaimlerChrylser). Until WWI, France was an acknowledged leader in automotive technology. The US took the lead on mass production of cars but that really happened after WWI.<P>If you wish to include all forms of self-propelled vehicles, then you also need to look to England in 1800s where steam driven coaches were used for a while before being put out of business by the "red flag" laws. The people running horse pulled stages got a law passed that said a man had to walk in front of these self propelled vehicles with a warning flag. This, of course, limited the speed the coaches could go to walking speed. So the horse driven carriages were faster and won the business. The repeal of these laws in the early 1900s was celebrated by the original London to Brighton run that is still run yearly.<P>If you include steam, you should also include the 1769 Cugeot tractor. In the late 1700s there were a number of attempts at amphibious vehicles that could move on land or water and were steam driven.<P>By the late 1800s many people were experimenting with "horseless carriages" in the US and Europe. Many of experiments were poorly documented and are largely forgotten. Only the big names remain. The Duryea brothers are generally credited with the first petrol powered car in the US in about 1894.<P>Ransom E. Olds built a car about 1895 and started producing the "curved dash" model about 1900. This was the first mass produced car. (More trivia: After Olds was sold into General Motors, R.E. Olds started another company using his initial for the name: REO. REO had a line of trucks called "Speedwagon". I wonder how many people who listened to the Reo Speedwagon rock group in the 1970s every got the connection.)<P>Ford was a relative late comer. His first buggy was built around 1896. The Ford Motor Company was established in 1903 and the famous Model T was first built in 1908. (More trivia: Ford had worked as chief engineer for the Detroit Motor Company, which after he left was renamed Cadillac.)<P>My 1931 Chilton's Multi-Guide lists hundreds of makes of cars, most of which were out of business by the late 1920s. These were actual makes of cars with separate manufactures, not just models of cars from a few manufactures like we have today.<P>So your seemingly simple question it not easy to answer.