100+ years ago someone in France build a tunnel for horse and carriage with a propeller and a steam engine on both ends. The tunnel went down at the start helping acceleration and up at the end to slow the cart down.

It might not be incredibly fast or even useful it does show we don't need to put the engine on the vehicle (entirely)

I just imagined a hilarious contraption using slow moving water in a canal. A screw is inserted in the stream driven by a wheel on the road. As long as the speed at which the road moves is different from the speed of the water you can keep extracting more speed from the flow. (haha)