Ford Model T in the context of Unibody

A car, or an automobile, is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of cars state that they run primarily on roads, seat 1-8 people, have four wheels, and mainly transport people rather than cargo. There are around 1.644 billion cars in use worldwide as of January 2025.

The French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built the first steam-powered road vehicle in 1769, while the Swiss inventor François Isaac de Rivaz designed and constructed the first internal combustion-powered automobile in 1808. The modern car—a practical, marketable automobile for everyday use—was invented in 1886, when the German inventor Carl Benz patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen. Commercial cars became widely available during the 20th century. The 1901 Oldsmobile Curved Dash and the 1908 Ford Model T, both American cars, are widely considered the first mass-produced and mass-affordable cars, respectively. Cars were rapidly adopted in the US, where they replaced horse-drawn carriages. In Europe and other parts of the world, demand for automobiles did not increase until after World War II. In the 21st century, car usage is still increasing rapidly, especially in China, India, and other newly industrialised countries.

In business theory, disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. The term, "disruptive innovation" was popularized by the American academic Clayton Christensen and his collaborators beginning in 1995, but the concept had been previously described in Richard N. Foster's book Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage and in the paper "Strategic responses to technological threats", as well as by Joseph Schumpeter in the book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (as creative destruction).

Not all innovations are disruptive, even if they are revolutionary. For example, the first automobiles in the late 19th century were not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensive luxury items that did not disrupt the market for horse-drawn vehicles. The market for transportation essentially remained intact until the debut of the lower-priced Ford Model T in 1908. The mass-produced automobile was a disruptive innovation, because it changed the transportation market, whereas the first thirty years of automobiles did not. Generative artificial intelligence is expected to have a revolutionary impact on the way humans interact with technology. There is much excitement about its potential, but also worries about its possible negative impact on labor markets across many industries. However, the real-world impacts on labor markets remain to be seen.

József Galamb (English: Joseph A. Galamb; 3 February 1881 – 4 December 1955) was a Hungarian mechanical engineer, most known as main-engineer for designing the Ford Model T.

Born in the town of Makó in 1881, Galamb finished his education at the Budapest Industrial Technology Engineering Course (the predecessor of the present-day Óbuda University Bánki Donát Politechnical College) in 1899. After receiving his diploma in mechanical engineering he worked at the Steel Engineering Factory in Diósgyőr as a draftsman. He next served one year in military service. He worked at the Hungarian Automobile Co., where he won a postgraduate scholarship to Germany. After the navy he went to see the world – Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. In 1903, he worked in many German cities as a skilled worker, he got the best education at Adler in Frankfurt. He was hired to assemble automotive engines in a process in which each engine was built completely by one man. When he learned of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, he used his savings to travel to America by ship in October 1903. After two months in New York, he found employment as a toolmaker at the Westinghouse Corporation in Pittsburgh. Although he planned to go back to Germany in 1904, instead he joined the Stearns Automobile Company in Cleveland as a carburetor maker.

Eugene Farkas (born Jenő Farkas; October 28, 1881 – February 24, 1963) was a Hungarian-American automotive engineer, most known for designing the Ford Model T and Fordson tractors.

The Car of the Century (COTC) is an international award that was given to the world's most influential car of the 20th century. The election process was overseen by the Global Automotive Elections Foundation. The winner, the Ford Model T, was announced at an awards gala on December 18, 1999 in Las Vegas, Nevada, US.

Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist and business magnate. As the founder of the Ford Motor Company, he is credited as a pioneer in making automobiles affordable for middle-class Americans through the system that came to be known as Fordism. In 1911, he was awarded a patent for the transmission mechanism that would be used in the Ford Model T and other automobiles.

Ford was born in a farmhouse in Springwells Township, Michigan, and left home at the age of 16 to find work in Detroit. It was a few years before this time that Ford first experienced automobiles, and throughout the later half of the 1880s, he began repairing and later constructing engines, and through the 1890s worked with a division of Edison Electric. He founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 after prior failures in business, but success in constructing automobiles.

The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 (also known as the Bankhead–Shackleford Act and Good Roads Act), Pub. L. 64–156, 39 Stat. 355, was enacted on July 11, 1916, and was the first federal highway funding legislation in the United States. The rise of the automobile at the start of the 20th century, especially after the low-price Ford Model T in 1908, created a demand for better roads on a national level. The act provided federal subsidies to road-building efforts.

Chevrolet is an American automobile division of the manufacturer General Motors (GM). In North America, Chevrolet produces and sells a wide range of vehicles, from subcompact automobiles to medium-duty commercial trucks. Due to the prominence and name recognition of Chevrolet as one of General Motors' global marques, "Chevrolet" or its affectionate nickname Chevy is used at times as a synonym for General Motors or its products, one example being the GM LS1 engine, commonly known by the name or a variant thereof of its progenitor, the Chevrolet small-block engine.

Louis Chevrolet (1878–1941), Arthur Chevrolet (1884–1946) and ousted General Motors founder William C. Durant (1861–1947) started the company on November 3, 1911 as the Chevrolet Motor Car Company. Durant used the Chevrolet Motor Car Company to acquire a controlling stake in General Motors with a reverse merger occurring on May 2, 1918, and propelled himself back to the GM presidency. After Durant's second ousting in 1919, Alfred Sloan, with his maxim "a car for every purse and purpose", picked the Chevrolet brand to become the volume leader in the General Motors family, selling mainstream vehicles to compete with Henry Ford's Model T in 1919 and overtaking Ford as the best-selling car in the United States by 1929 with the Chevrolet International.

Car controls are the components in automobiles and other powered road vehicles, such as trucks and buses, used for driving and parking.

While controls like steering wheels and pedals have existed since the invention of cars, other controls have developed and adapted to the demands of drivers. For example, manual transmissions became less common as technology relating to automatic transmissions became advanced.

A vintage car is, in the most general sense, an old automobile, and in the narrower senses of car enthusiasts and collectors, it is a car from the period of 1919 to 1930, Either a "survivor" or one that has been fixed up according to the original manufacturer's instructions. Such enthusiasts have categorization schemes for ages of cars that enforce distinctions between antique cars, vintage cars, classic cars, and so on. The classification criteria vary, but consensus within any country is often maintained by major car clubs, for example the Vintage Sports-Car Club (VSCC) in the UK.

Definitions vary based on how old a car must be to qualify as an antique. The Antique Automobile Club of America defines an antique car as over 25 years of age. However, the legal definitions for the purpose of antique vehicle registration vary widely. The antique car era includes the Veteran era, the Brass era, and the Vintage era, which range from the beginning of the automobile up to the 1930s. Later cars are often described as classic cars. In original or originally restored condition antiques are very valuable and are usually either protected and stored or exhibited in car shows but are very rarely driven.