Eighteen eighty five is so 122 years ago, Karl. All the coolest engineers and great thinkers were inventing cars back in 1478. Well, if by "car" you mean self-propelled conveyance, then yes, this is totally a car. (If you're going to be a d-bag and insist on internal combustion, then no, but you'd have to be Canadian to define it so narrowly.) Okay, Enough hubris; back to the retro-futuristic innovationism that is the Da Vinci car. The engineer in me really gets hot over the linear output of the spring-drive system big Leo D designed for this thing. Normally a spring drive just can't provide linear output, but DaVinci was kind of a genius and he figured out how to do it. Also new for the 1478 model year was the ability to steer and brake. Some nerds at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy decided to recreate this thing from Leo's original notes. What you see above is the result. Nobody really knows if DaVinci built a prototype, but who cares? It's cool and old. Wait a week and there will be a YouTube vid of some hooligan with JATO bottles strapped to it.–Ben Wojdyla

L'Automobile di Leonardo Da Vinci [Museum of the History of Science (in Italian)]

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