question of the day

What's Your Favorite Automotive Legend?

Car-related lore goes back a long time; to the very beginning in fact. Legend holds that Karl Benz's wife Bertha "borrowed" the car (and we mean the car) to take their two children to her folks' house some 50 miles away. The farthest Karl had ever driven it was perhaps a mile or two. I'm going to let Dan Neil take it from here: More »

retro

Karl Benz? Nein! DaVinci Invents the Automobile

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 More »

retro

Motorwagen and Ramen

It may have only had .75hp. It may have sounded more like industrial equipment than what we know as an automobile. But Karl Benz' Motorwagen birthed and snuffed more nations than D.W. Griffith ever dreamed possible in a very short span of time. Meanwhile, Momofuko Ando who invented instant ramen — essentially the Kia Rio of foodstuffs — died Friday. However, college life will go on, and it's rather funny to see Dan Neil obliquely reference the danger of bits of a rotating assembly ending up in his colon while tooling around Pasadena dressed as a man who could conceivably own a penny farthing. Ah, history. – Davey G. Johnson More »

news

The Vehicle That Signaled the Dawning of the Age is an Aquarius: The Benz Tri-Car Turns 120 Today

We don't know if there's really one day that can truly be celebrated as the birth of the commercial automobile, but it figures that today, January 29th which marks the 120th anniversary of Karl Benz's patent on his three-wheeled motoring machine is as good as any. So happy birthday, automobile. You've brought us more joy than grief, and well, you gave us a damn career. Without you, we'd be writing, uh, we don't know, Kotaku or something. [Thanks to zeroSignal for the heads-up.] More »