The First Car Had Three Wheels and Was Invented in 1885 — Here's Why

The Machine That Started Everything

On January 29, 1886, Karl Benz received a patent from the German Imperial Patent Office for "a vehicle with gas engine operation." Patent number DRP-37435 described a self-propelled three-wheeled vehicle powered by a single-cylinder four-stroke gasoline engine. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen — the world's first true automobile — had been built the previous year, in 1885, and represents the starting point from which every car, truck, bus, and motorsport vehicle in history descends.

The Patent-Motorwagen looked nothing like a modern car. It was essentially a light carriage frame mounted on three wire-spoke bicycle wheels, with a single rear-mounted engine and tiller steering at the front single wheel. It carried a driver and one passenger in a bench seat. Its engine produced less than one horsepower and propelled the vehicle at a top speed of about 16 kilometers per hour on flat ground.

Why Three Wheels?

The three-wheel configuration was not arbitrary — it solved a specific engineering problem that Benz was not ready to address in 1885: steering. A four-wheeled vehicle requires a differential steering mechanism that allows the outer wheel to travel faster than the inner wheel around a corner. Without this mechanism, a four-wheeled car with a rigid front axle would skid or resist turning. Differential steering had existed in theory for decades, but implementing it in an early experimental vehicle added significant mechanical complexity.

A three-wheeled vehicle with a single steerable front wheel sidesteps this problem entirely. The front wheel simply turns in the desired direction without any differential mechanism required. For a first prototype intended to demonstrate the viability of a gasoline-powered self-propelled vehicle, the three-wheel layout was the pragmatic choice: reduce the number of engineering problems to solve simultaneously.

Bertha Benz and the Test Drive That Made History

The Patent-Motorwagen had demonstrated its capabilities in local trials, but it was Karl Benz's wife, Bertha, who gave the vehicle its definitive public demonstration. On a morning in August 1888, without telling Karl, Bertha took the Motorwagen and drove it approximately 104 kilometers from Mannheim to her mother's home in Pforzheim — the first long-distance automobile journey in history.

The journey required Bertha to solve numerous problems along the way: she cleared a blocked fuel line with a hatpin, used her garter to insulate a failing ignition wire, had a blacksmith repair a chain, and had wooden brake blocks replaced at a cobbler's shop. Her journey demonstrated that the automobile was practically viable for real travel — not merely a laboratory curiosity — and the route she traveled is now a designated heritage road in Germany.

Karl Benz went on to found what would eventually become Mercedes-Benz, and the three-wheeled Patent-Motorwagen evolved through successive generations into four-wheeled vehicles with proper differential steering, enclosed engines, and performance characteristics that Benz himself could barely have imagined. But everything in automotive history starts with that tricycle in Mannheim in 1885.