horseless carriage

plural horseless carriages

1. historicalAn early automobile, of the types designed before World War I.

   Fanny Minafer had begun to talk to Lucy. "Your father wanted to prove that his horseless carriage would run, even in the snow," she said. "It really does, too."

   1918, Booth Tarkington, chapter VIII, in The Magnificent Ambersons, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC

   1 more example

   The movement for the introduction of horseless carriages is represented by two periodicals, the Horseless Age and the Motocycle, in the United States; the Autocar, in London; and La Locomotion Automobile and La France Automobile, in France.

   1896 August, Popular Science Monthly, volume 49

   Synonyms: Brass Era car

2. figurativelySomething new and unprecedented interpreted in older and familiar terms.

   horseless carriage thinking

   1 more example

   The basic operational mechanisms and business practices were so new and strange, so utterly sui generis, that all we could see was a gaggle of “innovative” horseless carriages.

   2018, Shoshana Zuboff, chapter 11, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism