Video: The first self-propelled vehicle was ungainly beyond belief
Advertisement117 years before Karl Benz fired up his Patent Motorwagen, a number of people played around with steam-powered contraptions of various degrees of impracticality.
None really worked all that well, but the first feasible self-propelled vehicle was Nicholas Cugnot’s steam dray. By “feasible,” I mean to say that it moved itself, though not quickly, and not terribly well. It had to stop frequently (read: every 10-15 minutes) for water and to rebuild the fire in the boiler, top speed was a measly 4 km per hour or so, and its weight distribution sucked—I mean, it needed a cannon slung underneath to keep it from tipping over. Also, the front-mounted boiler created a nice smokescreen for the driver when in motion.
Unsurprisingly, when Cugnot tried to sell his contraption to the French Army to cart artillery around, they decided to stick with the more reliable, less flammable domestic animals. Amazingly, Cugnot’s original awkward steam dray survived and is in a museum in Paris, 244 years after it first shambled down the cobblestones. But the running replica you see below wasn’t built in France as you might think.
It was actually built in Florida by the Tampa Bay Auto Museum, which itself was created by a French-born businessman to house his private collection of cars. The Cugnot is the centerpiece of the little museum, and its owners manage to take it out fairly frequently to fairs and events—it’s even registered for road use in Florida. Watch it in action below.
Source: roadandtrack.com
Advertisement
