Where was the first car invented?

This is actually a more complicated question than people might think! As with many inventions, there were several different places where it was being worked on, and the people who were developing it probably believed they were the first. Some sources say a Jesuit missionary named Ferdinand Verbiest built a steam powered car in China in 1672, and there were other experimental versions of a moving vehicle in the 1700s and early 1800s, such as one in France built by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot in 1769. But neither one of these worked very well; one was much like a toy, and the other was unsafe to drive, due to improper weight distribution. Thus, it is difficult to call either of them the first car; more accurately, these were two interesting experiments that led to further research and invention.

If we ignore the early efforts to create a moving vehicle and go directly to the mass-produced car (or auto), the kind that could actually transport passengers and was safe to drive on the road, that takes us to Germany. In the period from 1886 to 1888, Karl Benz (assisted by his wife Bertha, an inventor herself, as well as a businesswoman), successfully developed the gasoline-powered automobile. There was a French inventor, Emile Roger, who also did important work in the development of the auto around this time, as well as an American inventor named George B Selden. But most sources say that Karl Benz, in Mannheim, Germany, created what we today would think of as a car.