Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot was a French inventor who built the first working self-propelled land-based mechanical vehicle, the world's first automobile. This 1769 claim of earliest self-powered vehicle is disputed by some sources which suggest that around 1672 Ferdinand Verbiest, a member of a Jesuit mission in China, designed the first "steam-powered vehicle", but that it was too small to carry a driver and may have never been built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas-Joseph_Cugnot