They were basically toy devices designed to demonstrate the properties of steam. The conceptual use of them for work doesn't appear at all till the 16th century. Descriptions of using it as a turbine pop up in the 1500s, with detailed designs of pumps being made in the 1600s and the first piston used to raise weights was like in 1690. First steam powered device with real use was a water pump made in 1698.

Interestingly, though the combustion engine basically killed research into steam powered cars, there were some made all the way till 1930, see this thing which had a fast firing boiler and electric starter and could go over 90 miles an hour and 1500 (probably a lot less but this what they claimed) miles before having to refuel the water tank lol, it could run surprisingly clean depending on the fuel you used to heat the water. Same engineers later made some steam powered planes in the 1930s and there were a couple other projects since but nothing in mass production.

I'm actually not sure why steam engine use in vehicles stopped, the power efficiency is comparable or better than combustion, and the start up time is under a minute for well designed engines, and there's no tank boilers (they used a series of coiled small diameter tubes as boilers) so they don't explode. I think engine maintenance was worse though and research dollars and infrastructure were already moving more with internal combustion, and they were really heavy. It's kind of crazy how the cars worked, basically the boiler tubes would be filled then flash heated and instantly evaporate. If the money was really put into it though, steam engines are interesting viable alternatives to combustion and electric (would require ton of resources though and idk how it compares to electric vehicles given the maintenance, fuel source, and water requirements). If you want to see one of the Dobel cars (and can bear watching Jay Leno lol), his dumb car show did an episode on it here. There's also at least one company trying to work on modern steam engines for vehicle use (but I'm sure there's also tons of problems with it lol).