It’s a holiday weekend coming up, and most of us are already planning our drunken bender logistics, so all actual productive thought is long gone. So let’s do something goofier with our brains as we ride out the day, like picking what car someone who died long before cars would have driven! Could be fun! Right? Maybe?
So, I’m one of those people who tends to push the origin of cars pretty far back — I’d say we can count the existence of viable, plausible cars back to, oh, let’s say the 1830s. There were some prior to that, but the 1830s is when we started to see actual multiple cars (think big steam road locomotive-type things, mostly in the UK), so I’m saying the people we use had to be dead by 1830.
With that in mind, let’s grab a line-up of, say, six famous long-dead people:
Hieronymus Bosch
Cleopatra
Martin Luther
Leonardo DaVinci
That frozen caveman they found in the Alps
Gengis Khan
Okay! So, tell me — what car would each of these famous people drive, assuming they had access to any car ever made. And tell me why you decided what you did, and don’t be afraid to argue with everyone! I’m curious to see how this plays out.
Contact the author at jason@jalopnik.com.