What name is commonly given to Leonardo da Vinci’s self-moving cart, designed around 1500?

Leonardo da Vinci’s self-moving cart is commonly called the self-propelled cart.

Designed around 1500, the cart used springs to store energy and a programmable system of wooden blocks to control its movement. The mechanism could make the vehicle travel forward and turn, although it was not powered by an engine. Leonardo may have intended it for theatrical effects, such as appearing onstage at court celebrations.

The cart is frequently described as an early automobile or robot. Those labels are useful comparisons, but they can be misleading: the machine carried no passengers, used no combustion engine, and followed mechanical programming rather than responding to its surroundings.

A full-scale reconstruction was built in 2006 by researchers at the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia in Milan. It demonstrated that the design could move, although reconstructions necessarily interpret incomplete historical drawings.