Horse-drawn carriages and wagons provided the models for horseless carriages. Early motor car manufacturers hired carriage makers to make their vehicle bodies. We still use words for carriage styles to describe automobile body styles, such as brougham , coup , landau and phaeton .
Sedan comes from a word for a portable chair carried by two people.
In the early days, there were many instances of conflict when a horse was confronted with an early automobile. The noise of those early contraptions would frighten the horses, causing upset and injury to both drivers. It was this type of confrontation and the initial unreliability of the horseless carriage that led some people to believe that the horseless carriage was a passing fancy.