The English word «car» comes from the Latin «carrus», «carrum» meaning «wheeled vehicle». Originally, the car was seen as the two-wheeled vehicle that is distinguished from the four-wheel cart. Traditionally, the reference to the car can be found in the older literature from different cultures and parts of the world. It may symbolize the center of the universe and the planet Earth, the Sun, some star constellations and even humans.
For example, in The Iliad, the car is seen as a vehicle of gods and heroes. So it is represented as the fate of the world, battles and nations. In Indian mythology, the car is also often associated with the sun in its journey through the celestial sphere and with the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, which are respectively the Big Car and Small Car. Hindus give greater importance to those entities that drives a car. In their religion, it can be Agni, the fire, Prana, the breath, Atman, the Self-Even, or Buddhi, the intellect. In Buddhism, the car is an ego synonymous that only exists when its different parts are linked and that disappears as soon as there is disintegration, just like in the death of human beings. The car is the spiritual Buddha vehicle pulled by a white ox.
Obviously, only much later, “car” became a synonymous of “automobile”. This word appeared in France in 1875 and comes from a combination between the Greek word «αὐτός», meaning «I» or «self», and the Latin word «mobilis», which means «mobile» or «movable». But since the seventeenth century there were inventors who thought some vehicles driven by steam. Ferdinand Verbiest, a priest of Flanders, demonstrated it in 1678 when he conceived a small car by steam to the Emperor of China. In 1769, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, a military engineer, builds a real model of this vehicle designed by Ferdinand Verbiest. Unfortunately no one noticed his work in his native land. In fact, in the first ages of the automobile invention, it seems to have been a major concern in creating a vehicle that moved by its own power. Richard Trevithick, a British engineer, created also a vehicle similar to Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot machine. In 1789, Oliver Evans, an American inventor, records the first automobile patent in the United States of America. The vehicle invented by Evans moved the steam. The innovation of this vehicle is that moved on land and in water. In 1860 is created by the Belgian engineer Etienne Lenoir a car with an internal combustion engine, though it was powered by coal gas. We had to wait until 1885 to have a car with an internal combustion gasoline engine and until 1888 to have a mass production car. Without these contributions of the German engineer Karl Benz, it would have been unthinkable cars mass production developed by Henry Ford in the beginning of the twentieth century. This line of large-scale production cars affordable, developed by this American entrepreneur, will always continue to be a focus of the automotive industry until to the present times.