They were. They were loud and stinky and were unsuitable for dirt roads, spooking horses, causing the UK to basically ban them. Some were powered by steam or coal but those that were powered by gas had a different problem - there were no gas stations. You had to hand crank them to start. Moving goods and people around was already a solved problem with horses and trains and boats.
Cars then: take enormous energy to move very little, and slowly. Main use case then was as a rich person's toy (entertainment). They'll never replace work horses with them.
It's easy, in hindsight, to see cars as inevitable. But you had to see past the shortcomings of the earliest cars to "get it", much like you have to see past the 3 armed monstrosities that current image generation techniques produce and see the promise of the technology. There were undoubtedly those who saw cars as hype, much like image generation is seen today; I'm sure buggy whip manufacturers saw cars as hype and refused to get on what looked like a hype train to them.
