Leonardo da Vinci sketched designs for both an armored fighting vehicle and a self-propelled cart more than 500 years ago, making him the earliest known person to put these concepts on paper. But turning sketches into working machines took centuries and dozens of inventors. The history of tanks and cars share a surprising amount of overlap, with steam engines, internal combustion, and caterpillar tracks all feeding into both lineages.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Armored Vehicle and Cart
Around 1487, Leonardo drew plans for a cone-shaped armored vehicle bristling with cannons on all sides. The machine was meant to be powered from the inside by a crew turning cranks connected to a system of toothed wheels and gears. In theory, the cranking would rotate all four wheels and let the vehicle move in any direction. In practice, scholars who’ve studied the drawings found a glaring problem: the gears are arranged so the front and rear wheels would turn in opposite directions, canceling each other out. Some historians believe this was a deliberate sabotage by Leonardo, who may not have wanted his war machine actually built. Others chalk it up to a simple drafting error. Either way, the cranking system would have been nearly impossible to synchronize, making any motion slow and jerky even if the gears were corrected.
A decade earlier, in 1478, Leonardo had sketched something even closer to a car: a self-propelled cart. Instead of relying on human muscle, this device used coiled springs and gears to store energy and release it in a controlled way, rolling the cart forward on its own. It even had steering and brake capabilities. Experts who have recreated versions of the cart confirm the concept works in principle, though the materials available in the 15th century (wood frames, hand-forged metal gears) limited it to short movements. Leonardo’s cart is sometimes called the first “robot” or programmable vehicle, since it could follow a preset path without a driver.
From Steam Power to Gasoline Engines
The leap from sketches to a functioning self-propelled vehicle took nearly 300 years. In 1769, French military engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built the fardier à vapeur, a massive three-wheeled steam carriage designed to haul artillery. His improved version pulled up to four tons of equipment at about two and a half miles per hour. When demonstrated for the king, it dragged a two-and-a-half-ton payload from a military arsenal in the Paris suburbs to Vincennes. It was slow, hard to steer, and needed to stop every 10 to 15 minutes to build up steam pressure again, but it was the first vehicle in history to move under its own power on a road.
The internal combustion engine changed everything. Austrian inventor Siegfried Marcus began working on a self-propelled vehicle around 1860, building what many consider the first gasoline-powered car by about 1864 (photographed in 1870). He built a second, more refined version around 1875 in his Vienna factory, and he developed an early version of the carburetor, the device that mixes fuel with air for combustion. Marcus also built and sold atmospheric engines, two-cycle engines, and eventually four-cycle engines over the course of his career.
The date most often cited as the birth of the modern automobile, though, is January 29, 1886. That’s when Karl Benz filed a patent for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine.” His Patent-Motorwagen was a three-wheeled, two-seat vehicle with a compact single-cylinder four-stroke engine mounted horizontally at the rear, a tubular steel frame, a differential, and wire-spoked wheels. The engine produced just 0.75 horsepower. It featured innovations like an automatic intake slide, a controlled exhaust valve, high-voltage ignition with a spark plug, and water-cooled evaporation cooling. Benz had already built a successful business selling stationary gas engines, and the profits gave him the time and resources to pursue his real goal: a lightweight, purpose-built gasoline car where the engine and chassis worked as a single unit.
Pre-War Tank Concepts
Before World War I forced the issue, a handful of inventors independently imagined armored tracked fighting vehicles. In 1911, Austrian officer Gunther Burstyn submitted plans for his “Motorgeschütz” (motor gun) to the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of War. It was the first concrete design for an armored caterpillar-tracked vehicle with a cannon mounted in a rotating turret. Burstyn borrowed the rapid-fire cannon and turret concept from naval warships, and he may have drawn inspiration from the Austro-Daimler armored car. His design included details no one had specified before: the sector of fire for the turret, elevation angles, vehicle dimensions, and speed. He even patented a system of pivoting slide rails with metal rollers at each end of the vehicle, designed to help it cross trenches and obstacles. The Ministry of War rejected the proposal.
A year later, in 1912, Australian engineer Lancelot de Mole independently submitted his own design for a tracked fighting vehicle to the British War Office. His proposal is considered the earliest practical tank design offered to Britain. It too was rejected and filed away, only rediscovered after the war had already produced its own tanks through a completely separate chain of events.
Caterpillar Tracks and the Road to War
One critical piece of technology linking cars and tanks was the continuous track. British engineer Bramah Joseph Diplock developed the Pedrail wheel and chaintrack system in the early 1900s. In 1904, a trial attended by War Office members demonstrated that a Pedrail tractor (built by Fosters of Lincoln) could tow heavy loads over rough ground, climb hills, and turn with ease, producing a two-ton drawbar pull. The pedrail system wouldn’t be the exact track design that tanks ultimately used, but it directly influenced their development.
When trench warfare ground the Western Front to a standstill, Winston Churchill and others pushed for armored “land battleships.” Commodore Murray Sueter suggested adapting Diplock’s chaintrack system for the purpose. In February 1915, a demonstration was arranged for Churchill, Lloyd George, and senior War Office staff, showing the caterpillar system forcing through wire entanglements and climbing over obstacles. The demonstration led to an order for 18 pedrail-equipped armored tracked vehicles, though only one prototype was ever completed.
Little Willie and the First Working Tank
The push to build a real tank accelerated through 1915. British officer Ernest Swinton, with help from Colonel Maurice Hankey, persuaded Churchill to establish a Landships Committee to explore building a new type of war machine. The committee commissioned a prototype that became known as Little Willie, completed in September 1915.
Little Willie weighed 16.5 tonnes and was powered by a 105-horsepower Foster-Daimler Knight engine, a sleeve-valve petrol motor fed by gravity from two fuel tanks at the rear. The engine left just enough room beneath a small turret. The vehicle’s track frames were 12 feet long, and it could carry a crew of three at speeds just over three miles per hour. Steering proved tricky: designer William Tritton added a pair of wheeled tails at the rear to help guide the vehicle, bringing the overall length to about 26 feet. Little Willie never saw combat, but it proved the concept worked and led directly to the rhombus-shaped Mark I tank that rolled onto the Somme battlefield in September 1916.
The parallel histories of cars and tanks converge more than most people realize. Daimler engines powered both Karl Benz’s competitors and the first tank prototype. Caterpillar tracks descended from agricultural machinery. And the core idea behind both, a self-propelled vehicle carrying people or weapons, traces back to the same Renaissance sketchbook in Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop.