Inventors had been experimenting with self-propelled vehicles since the late 18th century, first with steam power, then with electricity, and finally with the gasoline engine that would come to define the modern car. The first practical, marketable automobile appeared in 1886, when German engineer Carl Benz developed a gasoline-powered vehicle and produced several identical copies for sale. Four years later, Benz's fellow countryman Gottlieb Daimler and his partner Wilhelm Maybach founded what would eventually become the company behind the Mercedes-Benz brand. Meanwhile in America, the Duryea brothers built the first successful gasoline-powered car on US soil in 1893, and by 1896 had sold 13 vehicles, the first commercially produced American cars. That same year, Henry Ford unveiled his own first motor vehicle, a small experimental machine he called the Quadricycle, setting him on the path toward transforming the industry altogether.

In the United States, the car arrived at the tail end of the Gilded Age, and its earliest adopters were almost exclusively the very wealthy. Horse-drawn carriages had long been a way for elite families to signal their status, with the grandest examples polished to a shine and often bearing a family crest. The horseless carriage slotted neatly into that same tradition. Owning one of these expensive and temperamental machines was, above all else, a statement of means. By the 1890s, Americans were buying cars from a small handful of domestic makers, while wealthy families in cities like New York had already begun trading their carriage rides down Fifth Avenue for something far more novel. Ransom Olds founded Oldsmobile in 1897 and pioneered the use of interchangeable parts on an assembly line, producing thousands of cars by 1903. Ford's Model T, which arrived in 1908, would eventually make the car accessible to ordinary Americans, but during the Gilded Age it remained firmly in the hands of those who could afford to be first.