Ferdinand Verbiest, a member of a Jesuit mission in China, built the first steam-powered vehicle around 1672 which was of small scale and designed as a toy for the Chinese Emperor, that was unable to carry a driver or a passenger, but quite possibly, was the first working steam-powered vehicle 'auto-mobile 'Leonty Shamshurenkov, a Russian peasant, constructed a human- pedaled four-wheeled "auto-running" carriage in 1752, and subsequently proposed to equip it with odometer and to use the same principle for making a self-propelling sledge.
Although Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot is often credited with building the first self-propelled mechanical vehicle or automobile in about 1769, by adapting an existing horse-drawn vehicle, this claim is disputed by some[citation needed], who doubt Cugnot's three-wheeler ever ran or was stable. What is not in doubt is that Richard Trevithick built and demonstrated his Puffing Devil road locomotive in 1801, believed by many to be the first demonstration of a steam-powered road vehicle, although it was unable to maintain sufficient steam pressure for long periods, and would have been of little practical use.In the 1780s, a Russian inventor of merchant origin, Ivan Kulibin, developed a human- pedaled, three-wheeled carriage with modern features such as a flywheel, brake, gear box, and bearings; however, it was not developed further | 
