Oldest Car Brands in the World by Year Founded
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Oldest Car Brands in the World by Year FoundedPeugeot is comfortably the oldest name on the list, founded in France in 1810 - decades before the automobile even existed - originally making coffee mills, tools and bicycles before building its first car in the 1880s. The Czech firm Tatra (1850) and Germany's Opel (1862) also predate the car itself, both starting in other industries. The birth of the actual automobile is marked by Mercedes-Benz, whose 1886 founding coincided with Karl Benz's Patent-Motorwagen, widely regarded as the first true car. The remaining brands cluster around the turn of the 20th century, when the industry rapidly took shape: Skoda (1895), Renault (1898), Fiat (1899) and the American marques Oldsmobile (1897) and Cadillac (1902). The list shows how many of today's carmakers trace their roots to craft workshops that long predated motoring.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- CarBuzz (oldest car brands)
- Coverage
- 10 entities · 10 observations
- Measure
- Year Founded
- Last updated
- 10 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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