When was first production car

Then, beginning in , Parliament imposed a series of highly restrictive Locomotive Acts , which heavily disincentivized road-going mechanical transportation; the Locomotive Act of , for example, limited speeds on the U.

This is especially ridiculous when you consider that vehicles were traveling several times that speed on English roads over three decades prior. Though these acts were later amended, and then repealed, they effectively slammed the brakes on automobile development in the U.

Railroad operators and horse-breeders were no doubt thrilled. In any case, this is an excellent reminder of just how long the dream of mechanical automobility has preoccupied inventors—and how often, the challenges of technological development can pale in comparison to the resistance offered by entrenched interests and a slowly evolving status quo. Car Life. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Public Domain.

What was the first company formed to build a car? First, what do we mean by car? Here's a replica in action: This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. Hulton Archive Getty Images. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen of A contender for the title of first purpose-built internal combustion-powered car, but by no means the first automobile.

The engine output was 0. In July the newspapers reported on the first public outing of the three-wheeled Benz Patent Motor Car, model no. The route included a few detours and took them from Mannheim to Pforzheim, her place of birth.

With this journey of kilometers including the return trip Bertha Benz demonstrated the practicality of the motor vehicle to the entire world. It was Carl Benz who had the double-pivot steering system patented in , thereby solving one of the most urgent problems of the automobile.

The AMC Eagle 4x4 of and the Audi Quattro of deserve some credit for popularizing the notion of driving all four wheels on your daily driver. Now, it appears on more than one-third of vehicles sold in the United States. AWD vs. The first to offer a seatbelt in a production car was Nash in , followed by Ford in ; Saab made them standard equipment in These were lap belts like those racers had started using some years earlier.

When offered as options they didn't sell very well, although these two-point belt systems became more popular in the early s. Volvo pictured still grounds its safety sales pitch in the company's invention of the three-point belt with a shoulder strap to restrain the torso.

Volvo made it standard in Inventor Nils Bohlin had been hired the year before from Saab, where he'd created the ejector seat for jet fighters and charged with making Volvo's cars safer.

The company patented the three-point belt but offered to let all automakers use it for free. This did not prevent others from coming up with messy two-belt "solutions" when U.

Although the first patents and research on airbag technology date to the early s, it was the Oldsmobile Toronado that was first available to the public with one. And we mean one. It was for the front-seat passenger. The photo shows a Buick Electra with the option.

There was a lot of pushing and pulling between government and industry, with the regulators first settling for any "passive" safety device as a requirement, leading the industry to meet the standard with automated safety belts while restricting airbags to optional equipment only on some models.

It wasn't until the model year that driver- and passenger-side airbags or "supplemental restraint systems" SRS became mandatory standard equipment. The Physics of Airbags. The Evolution of Car Keys. Opening and closing the window—if the car had them—was about as close to "climate control" as early cars offered. Aftermarket add-ons that captured heat from the exhaust system a dangerous source , heated a separate water supply, or used electricity to emit tepid warmth all arose in the s and s.

The modern heater core, a secondary radiator into which engine coolant circulates to warm the interior of the car, started showing up as an accessory add-on in the late s and Cadillacs had it in top left photo. It wasn't until that Nash was first to manage ventilation drawing air through the heater core from outside the car, though. The notion didn't really spread that rapidly. Dealer jargon for a basic car without options was one with "no stove heater , no harp radio.

Starting the engine, keeping it running, and powering the lights was about all early automotive electrical systems could manage, so the first radios were add-ons with their own batteries.

Chevrolet had a pricey option in , but until , interference from the ignition system made even the best radios unusable with the car in motion.

This began changing in with the introduction of the Motorola AM radio, still an aftermarket add-on that took days to install and had its own battery. It wasn't until that Motorolas like that in the bottom left photo became commonplace in cars from the factory, when Chevrolet was first to offer that option.

Sirius and XM—then competing but now merged—launched satellites in In-car receivers for the subscription service appear in more than half of the new cars sold in America today.

Nice as it was to have radio in the car, what came through the speakers was chosen by the broadcasters, not the car's occupants.

Bypassing the gatekeepers to dial up your own tunes began with the Chrysler Highway Hi-Fi, top left a vinyl record player. In a car. To keep it from skipping constantly, it rotated the record at slower speeds and the arm with the needle was designed to prevent it sliding across the record and scratching. This was not very effective, however, and the need to buy specific records designed for the car's players didn't appeal to owners and it faded fast.

An improvement was the eight-track tape player bottom left that first came as an aftermarket add-on. Ford was first to offer it from the factory, in Cassette tapes, which opened the door to the personal mix tape in addition to commercial albums, turned up on the aftermarket in , and you could still find the option on many cars built through In the U.

Power windows first appeared on model-year Packard s. The window "lifts" used hydraulics to power the operation, managed by electric switches. These were essentially a development from the technology used to operate power-folding tops on convertibles and were also employed to power seats on various luxury cars in the immediate postwar years. In , the Chrysler Imperial previously cited for its power steering had electric power windows.

Today, power windows are so much the standard that young drivers are often mystified when they encounter the rare hand-cranked window. While there are various assertions that a GM engineer patented the idea in the mids, the first production car with the option was the Cadillac DeVille bottom photo. Seat Massager Showdown. Touchscreens manage all kinds of functions on your cars but they were an amazing thing to see—in all their monochromatic glory—when the first ones appeared on the Buick Riviera.

They managed the radio, climate controls, trip computer, and what GM maddeningly insisted on calling "gages. Take a CRT monitor with a moving dot that could trace a line, overlay it with acetate maps Tokyo only , and then try to make the phosphorescent dot follow the same route you had pre-marked with the Honda-provided pens.

The dot moved in accordance with input from an inertial guidance system like those missiles and aircraft used pre-GPS , and Honda invented and patented a gas-rate gyroscope to manage the task.

The guidance system was more accurate than the maps available, so those had to be redrawn for the purpose. If you lived in Tokyo and could afford to throw down a couple grand atop the price of your Accord, the Electro Gyrocator option might help you get somewhere without getting lost. We kid. Honda was way ahead of the industry here and although some of its technology was just too early, it had a usable system using digital maps to offer on its Legend.

It wasn't GPS, though. And that was what in-car navigation really needed. Early GPS advocates carried their handheld units into cars in the early s, but Oldsmobile was first in the U.

The technologies of these ancillary industries, particularly steel and petroleum, were revolutionized by its demands. The automobile stimulated participation in outdoor recreation and spurred the growth of tourism and tourism-related industries, such as service stations, roadside restaurants and motels. The construction of streets and highways, one of the largest items of government expenditure, peaked when the Interstate Highway Act of inaugurated the largest public works program in history.

The automobile ended rural isolation and brought urban amenities—most important, better medical care and schools—to rural America while paradoxically the farm tractor made the traditional family farm obsolete. The modern city with its surrounding industrial and residential suburbs is a product of the automobile and trucking. The automobile changed the architecture of the typical American dwelling, altered the conception and composition of the urban neighborhood, and freed homemakers from the narrow confines of the home.

No other historical force has so revolutionized the way Americans work, live, and play. In , Americans have become truly auto-dependent.

But though automobile ownership is virtually universal, the motor vehicle no longer acts as a progressive force for change. New forces—the electronic media, the laser, the computer, and the robot probably foremost among them—are charting the future. A period of American history that can appropriately be called the Automobile Age is melding into a new Age of Electronics. Eric Foner and John A.

Garraty, Editors. All rights reserved. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. In his 84 years, Thomas Edison acquired a record number of 1, patents singly or jointly and was the driving force behind such innovations as the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb and one of the earliest motion picture cameras. The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War.

For years, scientists and Developed in the s and s by Samuel Morse and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations.

In addition to helping invent the telegraph, Samuel Morse In , Connecticut-born gun manufacturer Samuel Colt received a U. Colt founded a company to manufacture his revolving-cylinder pistol; however, sales were slow and the Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power.

He invented the first alternating current AC motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology.