When were cars invented?

1672 Ferdinand Verbiest invented the first car in the year 1672. It was the first ever car invented and was powered by steam. Ferdinand was an experimentalist and a missionary to China. He built his car in China. 
1769 The very first self-powered road vehicles were powered by steam engines and by that definition Nicolas Joseph Cugnot of France built the first automobile in 1769.  1806 Francois Isaac Rivaz, a Swiss inventor, designed and invented the first ever car with an internal combustion engine. This car engine was fueled with a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. This car was made in 1806. However, this design was not a success.  1881 In 1881, Gustave Trouve designed and invented the first ever car powered by electricity. 

 1885 Four years later in 1885, Karl Benz designed and built a car powered by gasoline. This car was made in Germany. This was the first ever car to be granted a patent in 1886. The rest is history and the world acknowledged Karl Benz as the "Inventor of the modern automobile".  

A: The car was not invented by one single person, it evolved gradually over Centuries as a result of experiments and research done by many different designers and engineers. Leonardo da Vinci designed cars that were powered by pedals, pulley or clockwork, and the first internal combustion engines first appeared in the 17th Century and used gunpowder as fuel! Steam-powered road vehicles began appearing in the late 18th Century- one of the most famous is the three-wheeled steam tractor developed by the French engineer Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot, which first appeared in 1769 and remains preserved to this day in a museum in Paris. 

Steam-powered road coaches were in use across Britain and Europe by the end of the Georgian era, with regular passenger services running in and around the major cities. Petrol-engined cars were being experimented with throughout the 19th Century, with various one-off machines appearing from time to time, but the first known really successful one was launched by Daimler in 1875. 

The first production-model car appeared on the market ten years later, which was the Benz 3-wheeler (basically a huge tricycle with a single-cylinder engine and belt drive). By the 1890s, several car companies had sprung up across Britain and Europe, and the first American-built car (a Ford) appeared in 1896.(Answer.com)