The Automobile

An automobile, is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor. Most definitions of the term specify that automobiles are designed to run primarily on roads, to have seating for one to eight people, to typically have four wheels. However, the term automobile is far from precise, because there are many types of vehicles that do similar tasks.

According to Wikipedia there are approximately 600 million passenger cars worldwide (roughly one car per eleven people). Around the world, there were about 806 million cars on the road in 2007; they burn over 1 billion m³  of petrol/gasoline and diesel fuel yearly. The numbers are increasing rapidly, especially in China and India who are becoming more industrialized every year