History of Cars  |  Events & Milestones  |  Advent of cars in India

With the invention of the wheel in 4000 BC, man’s journey on the road of mechanized transport had begun. Since then he continually sought to devise an automated, labor saving machine to replace the horse. Innumerable attempts reached conclusion in the early 1760s with the building of the first steam driven tractor by a French Captain, Nicolas Jacob Cugnot.


It was however left to Karl Benz and Gottlieb Damlier to produce the first vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine in 1885. It was then that the petrol engine was introduced, which made the car a practical and safe proposition. The cars in this period were more like the cars on our roads today. With cars came the era of speed.

The first ever land-speed record was established about a 100 years back, in 1898. Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat of France drove an electric car (in Acheres near Paris) at a speed of 39.24 miles per hour. This flagged off the era of ‘wheels racing’, which lasted till 1964, after which jet and rocket -propelled vehicles were allowed.

Then onwards, it has been one big journey...on the roads.

History of Cars  |  Events & Milestones  |  Advent of cars in India