Which automobile pioneer is credited in 1886 as manufacturing the first vehicle powered with an internal-combustion engine?

While other inventors had experimented with placing engines on carts, German engineer Karl Friedrich Benz is credited with creating the first truly integrated automobile. In 1886, he received a patent for his Benz Patent-Motorwagen, a three-wheeled vehicle designed from the ground up around its power source. Unlike its predecessors, the chassis and the single-cylinder, four-stroke internal-combustion engine were conceived as a unified whole, establishing the core principle of automobile design.

The initial public reaction was one of skepticism toward the noisy, "horseless carriage." The vehicle's success and fame owe a great deal to Benz's wife, Bertha. In 1888, without her husband's knowledge, she took the car on a 65-mile journey to visit her mother, effectively completing the world's first long-distance road trip. Her daring drive proved the automobile's practicality to the world and generated immense publicity, helping to launch the automotive age.

This pioneering work laid the foundation (Review) for the company Benz & Cie., which later merged to become Daimler-Benz, the manufacturer of Mercedes-Benz vehicles. For this reason, German patent number 37435, granted to Benz on January 29, 1886, is widely considered the birth certificate of the automobile.