Abstract
Information regarding the automobile was soon spread among Romanian inhabitants at the end of the 20th century. The automobile notion was quickly assimilated. Once the self-propelled transport means were introduced, the population of the cities was engaged in the most thrilling competition of the century, the speed competition. One of the determinant factors of these transformations was the automobile. The paper exposes some of the Romanian forerunners of the automobile, the import expansion at the beginning of the 20th century in Romania, the settling of the automobile club, and some significant contributions of the Romanian inventors to the increasing the automobiles performances.