Cars were really only for the ultra rich until Ford started making them in an assembly line. The world wide numbers are in the tens of thousands until the late twenties and early thirties when Ford got up into hundreds of thousands of cars per year.

Generally the first real car is credited to the machine Benz’s wife drove into town at one point. That had a differential on an axle and it was this addition that really made it into a complete machine that one could use. Still, Benz did not make many cars at all per year. It was in the thousands, but at this scale, these were only for the ultra rich.