An automobile is a wheeled vehicle with an engine that carries people or goods on roads.

Before automobiles became common in the early 1900s, people traveled by horse-drawn carriage, which was slow and required constant care of horses. The automobile changed everything. Henry Ford's Model T, introduced in 1908, made cars affordable for ordinary families. Within a few decades, automobiles transformed how people lived: families could live farther from where they worked, businesses could deliver goods faster, and people could travel for pleasure in ways that were impossible before.

Today, we usually call automobiles cars, though the full word appears in formal contexts like automobile insurance or automobile manufacturing. The word covers everything from compact sedans to pickup trucks, though it typically doesn't include motorcycles or larger vehicles like buses and semi-trucks.

The automobile industry remains one of the world's largest, employing millions of people who design, build, sell, and repair vehicles. Modern automobiles are evolving rapidly, with electric motors replacing gasoline engines and computers handling more of the driving.