When searching for a city in all of North America where the motor vehicle‘s historical significance is permanently encapsulated in its streets, look no farther than Philadelphia. And like any other US metropolis, it changed Philadelphia as much as any other invention from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.
Some one hundred and twenty-five years later and lasting for nine days, the 2026 version of a most popular automobile event in our city — our Auto Show — kicked off at the Philadelphia Convention Center complete with its annual Black Tie Tailgate.
Outside of the Convention Center and around Center City, Philadelphians have a new vehicular spectacle drawing attention as Waymo Driverless Taxis continue to be tested downtown since 2025 although not currently available for public use. Those test vehicles — Jaguar I-Pace’s with the rooftops adorned on the apparatuses — can be spotted with human testers in and around the city.
By the 1920s on Philadelphia’s interwoven streets — a vision brought to life by William Penn and Thomas Holme — and a maze of vertical and horizontal streets including five original squares that still bring Philadelphians and visitors alike to myriad of places around Philadelphia between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers were swarmed with automobiles.
Just over 125 years ago in 1899, Philadelphia’s streets saw something that they had never experienced before. Philadelphia baker Jules Junker had imported and registered the City’s first horseless carriage in the city. The automobile had arrived in Philadelphia in the form of Junker’s French car identified as a DeDion-Bouton. Philadelphians both young and old marveled at the innovation, which took to our city’s thoroughfares some of which dated back to its very inception in 1682 among the horses, carriages, and wagons still in service as the city came into the 20th century.
Three years later, at the Philadelphia Convention Hall and Civic Center on 34th Street in University City and sponsored by the Automobile Dealers Association of Greater Philadelphia was our city’s first Auto Show in 1902. Philadelphia also boasted the first Automobile Club in 1900. Six years later between 1908 and 1911, the city saw its first auto races. The Fairmount Park Motor Races, which featured a more than 150-mile contest during Philadelphia’s Founder’s Week, attracted nearly half a million observers.
Not long after that first ever 1902 Auto Show, Philadelphia’s obsession with the horseless carriages was cemented. Hunting Park’s Budd Company was a first in the manufacturing of an all-steel body for the in 1912, and both the Fox and Biddle Motor companies began production of automobiles between 1915 and 1922. At Broad Street and Lehigh Avenue, Ford Motor Company opened a plant capable of producing one hundred and fifty of Henry Ford’s Model T’s per day in the iconic Botany 500 Building. On North Broad Street, Philadelphia’s Automobile Row featured dealers from Packard, Cadillac, and Oldsmobile.
Today, our city doesn’t boast the largest Auto Show around the globe or even in North America, but for car enthusiasts in the US the motor vehicle is indeed an unmistakably important part of Philadelphia history.
