The common name for Leonardo da Vinci’s armored fighting vehicle is tank.
Leonardo drew the vehicle in the 1480s as a conical, armored machine mounted on wheels. Its sloping shell was intended to deflect incoming projectiles, while several light cannons were arranged around the vehicle so they could fire in different directions.
The design was supposed to be moved by people turning cranks connected to the wheels. A well-known feature of the sketch is that the gear arrangement appears mechanically flawed: the opposing wheels would tend to rotate in incompatible directions. Some historians and engineers have suggested that this may have been an error, a copying issue, or deliberate concealment of the intended mechanism.
Leonardo’s vehicle was never built as a Renaissance battlefield machine. Its modern nickname comes from its armored, enclosed form and its resemblance to later tanks, which developed centuries afterward. The drawing is therefore best understood as an early armored-vehicle concept, not the first operational tank.