Which One Was Actually the First Car? It Wasn't Karl Benz

Karl Benz gets all the credit for "inventing the car" — but a self-moving vehicle existed a century before he was born, and it crashed into a wall decades before anyone called a vehicle a "car" at all. This video traces four different "firsts" hiding behind one simple label: a 17th-century Jesuit missionary who built a steam-powered toy for the Chinese emperor in 1672, a French military engineer whose 1769 war machine caused history's first recorded car accident, Karl Benz's 1886 patented Motorwagen that everyone actually remembers, and Bertha Benz — Karl's wife — who secretly drove that Motorwagen 66 miles in 1888 and invented the brake pad along the way, without telling her husband. So which one was really first? Depends on the question you're asking. Chapters: 0:00 What does "first car" even mean? 1:33 The toy that moved itself (1672) 2:49 The machine built for war (1769) 5:09 The patent that gets all the credit (1885-86) 5:53 The drive nobody approved (Bertha Benz, 1888) 7:20 So which one was first? #history #cars #automobilehistory #karlbenz #berthabenz