What were some of the earliest steam-and gasoline-driven vehicles?Before Benz and Daimler, there were earlier, self-propelled road vehicles, including a steam-driven contraption invented by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. The French inventor rode the Paris streets at 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) per hour in 1769. Richard Trevithick, a British inventor and mining engineer, also produced a steam-driven vehicle that could carry eight passengers. It first ran in 1801, in Camborne, England. Londoner Samuel Brown built the first practical four-horsepower gasoline-powered vehicle in 1826. And the Belgian engineer J.J. Etienne Lenoire built a vehicle with an internal combustion engine that ran on liquid hydrocarbon fuel in 1862, but he did not test it on the road until September 1863, when it traveled a distance of 12 miles (19.3 kilometers) in three hours. |