Automobiles are vehicles that can be used to get from place to place without the need for another source of power (like a horse). They have four wheels and an internal combustion engine, most commonly powered by gasoline or some other volatile fuel. There are many different types of automobiles, including electric cars, but all have the same basic structure.
The modern automobile is a complex technical system, consisting of thousands of individual components that have evolved through breakthroughs in technology such as electronic computers, high-strength plastics, and new alloys of steel and nonferrous metals. Some advances have been driven by environmental, safety, and fuel economy regulations, while others have emerged from consumer demand for greater convenience and luxury features.
The modern automobile is an icon of both American ingenuity and American excess. The first true modern motorcar, the 1901 Mercedes designed by Wilhelm Maybach for Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, weighed fourteen pounds per horsepower and achieved a top speed of fifty-three miles per hour. But by 1904, Ransom E. Olds’s one-cylinder, three-horsepower, tiller-steered curved-dash Model T could sell for $650 and was operated at a fraction of the cost. This remarkable alignment of abstemious style with demand, Albert argues, made the Model T America’s first mass-produced automobile and helped to de-urbanize it, turning it into a private, populist, and rural mode of transportation.