The Benz Patent Motorwagen is the vehicle most widely credited as the first true automobile because it was patented in 1886 and was designed from first principles around its own internal combustion engine rather than adapted from a horse drawn carriage. But self propelled road vehicles predate it by over a century: Nicolas Joseph Cugnots steam powered fardier a vapeur of 1769 is often cited as the first self propelled road vehicle, and various steam carriages operated in Britain in the early nineteenth century. The dispute is less about facts than definition: what counts as an automobile rather than merely a self propelled vehicle.
What would resolve this This is chiefly a definitional dispute rather than a factual one; it resolves only by the atlas stating its own working definition of automobile explicitly, which the entity descriptions here already do implicitly by scope, and by naming the earlier steam vehicles honestly as self propelled road vehicles rather than automobiles by the narrower definition.
OpenHistory of technologyWikipedia: Benz Patent-Motorwagen