A car's wheels actually lose force, and that is the whole point
As a simple machine, the wheel and axle exists to multiply force: push on the big rim and the slim axle turns with extra strength. A car runs it backwards. Its transmission drives the narrow axle, so the mechanical advantage falls well below one, and what the car gains instead is speed at the tyre.
The machine is really a lever in disguise. Two cylinders of different sizes spin together on one axis, the bearing acting as the fulcrum. A point on the rim travels farther per turn than a point on the axle, and since power equals force times speed, a small push at the rim delivers a bigger pull at the axle. The ideal gain is simply the wheel's radius divided by the axle's; friction trims that by the machine's efficiency. When a wheel would have to grow absurdly large, engineers chain toothed wheels, or gears, into what amounts to a compound lever.
A car can get away with its low leverage because the grip needed to roll along a road is small. A windlass shows the classic use: in Roman Egypt, Hero of Alexandria listed the wheel and axle among machines for lifting weights, probably meaning a crank turning a drum that winds up a bucket's rope. Renaissance scientists, reading Greek technical texts, later counted it among the six simple machines.
Its oldest job was shaping clay. Slow wheels called tournettes, stone or clay discs pegged to the ground and hard to turn, were in Middle Eastern workshops during the 5th millennium BCE; an example from Tepe Pardis in Iran dates to between 5200 and 4700 BCE. Freely spinning potter's wheels with a proper axle arrived in Mesopotamia by about 4200 to 4000 BCE, and pictographs from Uruk show wheeled wagons between 3700 and 3500 BCE.
Real hardware survives too. In 2002 archaeologists pulled a wooden wheel and its axle from the Ljubljana Marshes, about 20 kilometres south of Slovenia's capital. Radiocarbon dating puts it at 5,100 to 5,350 years old. The wheel, built of ash and oak, has a 70 centimetre radius, and its oak axle is 120 centimetres long, turning together with the wheel in the Alpine style.
Source: Wheel and axle
