Automobile
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145 free Automobile trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
13 free Automobile trivia questions with answers. Automobile trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is Cars & Automotive trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which German engineer is widely credited with patenting the first gasoline-powered automobile in 1886?
Karl Benz
Karl Benz patented his three-wheeled Motorwagen in January 1886; about 60 miles away, Gottlieb Daimler built a motor carriage of his own that same year, each man working independently of the other.
Q 02Ford's moving assembly line borrowed its idea from the overhead trolley lines of which Chicago industry?
Meatpacking
Meatpacking: Chicago's packers ran a 'disassembly line', hanging each carcass from a trolley that carried it past butchers who did one task apiece; Ford reversed the idea, adding parts at every station.
Q 03What ignites the air-fuel mixture in a gasoline engine but is missing from a diesel?
Spark plug
Spark plug: it fires an electric spark inside the cylinder to light the fuel; a diesel carries glow plugs instead, but those only warm the engine to help it start in cold weather.
Q 04What does the acronym ABS stand for in the context of automotive safety systems?
Anti-lock Braking System
An Anti-lock Braking System stops the wheels locking under hard braking so the driver keeps steering control; it is fitted to cars, motorcycles, trucks and aircraft.
Q 05Which exhaust-system device turns toxic pollutants into less harmful gases?
Catalytic converter
A catalytic converter uses platinum, palladium and rhodium to turn carbon monoxide, unburned fuel and nitrogen oxides into carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen; those precious metals are why thieves cut converters off parked cars.
Q 06Why did Jaguar drop its Leaper mascot from cars sold in Europe?
Pedestrian safety
Pedestrian safety: European rules required bonnet ornaments to fold or snap off in a collision, yet American buyers still wanted the leaping cat, so Jaguar kept fitting it to cars bound for the US.
Q 07Which car body style has a three-box layout with separate engine, passenger and cargo compartments?
Sedan
A sedan, called a saloon in Britain, keeps engine, passengers and luggage in three separate boxes; the name was borrowed from the sedan chair, a covered seat that porters carried on poles.
Q 08What type of internal combustion engine uses an eccentric rotary design with a triangular rotor instead of traditional reciprocating pistons?
Wankel engine
The Wankel engine, named after Felix Wankel, first reached buyers in Germany's NSU Spider; Mazda then spent years curing its scored housings and oil thirst before making it a sports-car trademark.
Q 09Which Swedish manufacturer made the modern three-point seat belt standard equipment in 1959?
Volvo
Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin, who had designed ejector seats for Saab aircraft, devised the three-point belt, and Volvo then opened the patent so that rival carmakers could use it free.
Q 10Which German engineer, born in 1858, gave his name to the compression-ignition engine?
Rudolf Diesel
Rudolf Diesel invented the compression-ignition engine that burns the fuel named after him; in 1913 he vanished from the deck of a steamer bound for England, and his death was never explained.
Q 11Which component lets a car's two driven wheels turn at unequal speeds through a corner?
The differential
The differential splits engine torque between the two driven wheels while letting them rotate at different speeds; the outer wheel covers a longer arc in every corner.
Q 12A supercharger is driven mechanically by the engine, but what spins a turbocharger's turbine?
Exhaust gases
Exhaust gases spin the turbine, which is why a turbocharger suffers turbo lag: at low revs the exhaust flow is too weak to spin it up, so the boost arrives a moment late.
Q 13Which engineer led the design team behind the Volkswagen Type 1 in the 1930s?
Ferdinand Porsche
Q 21By 1918, roughly what fraction of all cars in the United States were Model Ts?
Half
Half: Ford kept cutting the price as production climbed, and by the mid-1920s a new Model T cost about a third of its launch price.
Q 22The word 'automobile' combines Latin 'mobilis' with 'autós', meaning 'self', from which language?
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek: autós, 'self', was joined to Latin mobilis, 'movable', in French; modern Greeks avoid the hybrid and call a car an autokineto, 'moved of itself', built from Greek alone.
Q 23Which gas fuelled the first internal-combustion vehicle, built by Swiss inventor François Isaac de Rivaz around 1807?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen: de Rivaz mixed it with oxygen in a cylinder and fired it with an electric spark, and in 1807 the blasts drove a carriage a short distance, nearly 80 years before the petrol car.
Ferdinand Porsche signed the development contract in June 1934, and the first prototypes were hand-built over the next two years at his own home rather than in a factory.
Q 14Which French inventor built the first steam-powered vehicle capable of carrying people, in 1769?
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot's fardier à vapeur of 1769 was a three-wheeled steam tractor built to haul artillery for the French army; it proved too slow and unwieldy to develop further.
Q 15Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest designed a 1670s toy steam cart for which ruler?
The Kangxi Emperor
The Kangxi Emperor: Verbiest, a Flemish Jesuit astronomer at the Qing court, described the steam-driven cart in his Astronomia Europea, but no other account confirms that it was ever actually built.
Q 16Which 1901 vehicle is generally regarded as the first mass-produced automobile?
Oldsmobile Curved Dash
The Oldsmobile Curved Dash sold 425 in 1901 and 2,500 the next year; Ransom Olds said a factory fire that spared only this little runabout had made the choice of model for him.
Q 17What was the Ford Model T's popular nickname?
The Tin Lizzie
The Tin Lizzie worked off the road too: farmers took off a wheel, fastened a pulley to the hub and ran a belt from it to drive saws, pumps and threshers.
Q 18Despite Ford's famous line, what colours was the Model T actually sold in from 1908 to 1913?
Grey, green, blue and red
Grey, green, blue and red came first, and by 1912 every car left the works in midnight blue; the famous black-only rule held just from 1914 to 1925, and colours returned for the final years.
Q 19In 1914 Henry Ford more than doubled his factory workers' pay to which famous daily wage?
$5
$5 a day, up from $2.34, with the shift cut from nine hours to eight: Ford wanted to stop workers quitting the monotonous line, and skilled mechanics soon flocked to him.
Q 20Which control shifted a Ford Model T between low and high gear?
A foot pedal
A foot pedal: pressing the left pedal down gave low gear and letting it up gave high, the middle pedal was reverse, and the throttle was not a pedal at all but a hand lever.
Q 24The last of 21.5 million original Volkswagen Beetles left the line in 2003 in which country?
Mexico
Mexico: the final car, number 21,529,464, left the Puebla plant on 30 July 2003, a quarter-century after the last German-built saloon, and went straight to a Volkswagen museum.
Q 25Which German city was founded in 1938 to house the workers building the Volkswagen Beetle?
Wolfsburg
Wolfsburg began as 'Stadt des KdF-Wagens', the City of the Strength-through-Joy Car, and took its present name from a nearby castle only in 1945; the car was not officially called the Beetle until 1968.
Q 26Hitler insisted the Volkswagen be air-cooled because, he said, not every country doctor had his own what?
A garage
A garage: an air-cooled engine has no radiator water to freeze in a car left outdoors all winter; at the same 1934 meeting he capped fuel use at seven litres per 100 km.
Q 27Ray Harroun won the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911 in a Marmon Wasp fitted with which novel device?
A rear-view mirror
A rear-view mirror: Harroun raced without the usual riding mechanic who watched for cars behind, so he mounted a mirror instead; he later said the brick track shook it so badly it was useless.
Q 28Which Japanese carmaker's name is the Japanese word for the Pleiades star cluster?
Subaru
Subaru is Japanese for the Pleiades; its six-star badge stands for the five companies that merged in 1953 to form Fuji Heavy Industries, plus the parent.
Q 29The world's first compulsory seat belt law was passed in 1970 in which place?
Victoria, Australia
Victoria, Australia made wearing a fitted belt compulsory in 1970; New South Wales copied the law the next year, and every other Australian state had followed within three years.
Q 30Which American carmaker sold the first passenger airbags to the public, as its 1970s 'Air Cushion Restraint System'?
General Motors
General Motors offered the bags from the 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado on, but so few buyers paid extra for them that the option was dropped after the 1976 model year.