Leonardo da Vinci’s armored car design was powered by people turning internal cranks.
Leonardo drew the fighting vehicle around 1487–1490 while developing military machines. The conical, turtle-like vehicle was covered by protective armor and carried weapons around its perimeter. Inside, operators would turn cranks connected to the wheels, allowing the vehicle to move across the battlefield.
The design is often called Leonardo’s tank, but that modern label can mislead. It was not a tracked tank, and its proposed mechanism had a famous technical problem: the gearing as commonly reconstructed would make the wheels turn in conflicting directions. Some historians have suggested that this may have been deliberate sabotage or simply an error in the drawing.
The machine was never built for Renaissance warfare. Its historical importance is as an early armored fighting-vehicle concept, not as a working predecessor with all the capabilities of a twentieth-century tank.