In 1886 in Mannheim, Karl Benz patented the Motorwagen, a three-wheeled vehicle driven by a single-cylinder internal-combustion engine and widely regarded as the first practical automobile. Around the same period Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach developed their own high-speed petrol engines and vehicles. Over the following decades the petrol-engined car was refined and, with mass production, transformed from a luxury into a consumer good. Bertha Benz's long 1888 drive helped prove the machine's practicality to a sceptical public.
Mass car ownership remade urban form around roads, junctions, parking and low-density suburbs, and made possible the dispersed, car-dependent metropolis that dominated twentieth-century planning.