What was Leonardo da Vinci’s wheeled vehicle powered by winding springs called?
Answer
Self-propelled cart
Leonardo da Vinci’s wheeled vehicle powered by winding springs was a self-propelled cart.
Leonardo designed the cart around 1478–1480. Its movement came from coiled leaf springs, which stored mechanical energy when wound. Gears transferred that energy to the wheels, while a steering mechanism helped determine the cart’s route. The surviving drawing also suggests a system for controlling how far the vehicle traveled.
The machine is sometimes called a robot car or an early automobile, but those labels can mislead. It had no engine, fuel system, or driver’s seat in the modern sense. Its purpose may have been theatrical: a moving cart could have carried scenery or appeared during court festivities.
A full-scale reconstruction was built for an exhibition at the Florence Museum of the History of Science in 2006. Researchers later found that a concealed feature in the original design could have made the movement more reliable. The cart is best understood as a sophisticated spring-powered automaton.