[warmjets222]

I've been reading Dashiell Hammett detective stories from the early 1920s and it seems like cars were almost exclusively referred to colloquially as 'machines' back then.

[tedggh]

Steel machines of hell. That’s how I saw them in an editorial work dating back to the early 1900’s talking about the arrival of cars in the city.

[SkiFire13]

Some languages still colloquially refer to cars with the same word used for machine.