Did Renaissance Man Leonardo da Vinci Invent the Car?

For Close to 120 years Karl Benz and Daimler Gottlieb Have Been Considered By Most to be the Inventors of the Automobile

Whose idea was it to create the world's first self-propelled vehicle? As far as teachers and textbooks are concerned, this title

Who invented the first self-propelled vehicle? It may be the "Renaissance Man" himself, Leonardo da Vinci.

belongs to the German duo of Karl Benz and Daimler Gottlieb whose three-wheeled 0.75 horsepower carriage chugged out onto German streets in early 1886.

This widely-accepted school of thought excludes the one-off steam-powered vehicles which were designed and built prior to the gasoline-powered Benz, on the premise that they were not successful and very few were made.

It appears that the argument that proponents of steam-powered vehicles propose is a moot point, however, but not because Benz and company are necessarily the true inventors of the automobile. Several hundred years earlier in the

History's first self-propelled vehicle was sketched by Leonardo in around 1,478. (Photo: Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence)

15th century Leonardo da Vinci, one of the world's most prolific inventors, artists and thinkers, a man who was no doubt responsible for the term "Renaissance Man" due to such famous paintings as the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, plus his countless mechanical sketches and "doodles" including a helicopter, a submarine, a tank, a robot, a parachute and a suspension bridge, invented the automobile first.

Say what? Move over Karl and Daimler, as it seems history's first self-propelled vehicle (until we're otherwise told) was sketched by Leonardo in around 1,478, 408 years before the German team made its first three-wheeler, and 431 years before Henry Ford's first Model T rolled off the assembly line in Detroit, USA.