AS ALL schoolboys know, Leonardo da Vinci invented, at least on paper, the aeroplane, the helicopter, the tank, the parachute, the bicycle, the steam engine, the dredger and the life jacket, not to mention plastic.

What is not widely appreciated is that five centuries ago the Renaissance genius also invented the car. And it works.

The car — immediately dubbed “Leonardo’s Automobile”, or even “Leonardo’s Fiat” — does not look much like a modern vehicle, it has to be said, but more like a primitive first draft for the 1973 Reliant Robin, or less charitably, a 15th-century go-kart.

“It looks like a rustic contraption,” admitted Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Institute and Museum of Science in Florence, as it careered across the floor towards us at high speed, forcing us to jump out of the way. “But it is actually highly sophisticated. It is a work of genius, and Italian.”

The “car” is a three wheeler, and is propelled not by steam, batteries, petrol or even hydrogen but by coiled springs. Not even Leonardo saw the internal combustion engine coming, but his car can travel up to 30 metres before the springs run down.

Technicians in Florence have constructed two functioning models according to Leonardo’s 1478 designs in Folio 812 of the Atlantic Codex: one “life size”, measuring 170cm (67in), by 150cm, the second on a reduced scale at 50cm by 60cm, which was used in yesterday’s demonstration.

A third cutaway model illustrates the internal mechanisms of the device. Signor Galluzzi said that technicians had first made three-dimensional digital versions of Leonardo’s designs in the Codex before tackling the real thing. “The main problem was deciding on historically plausible materials,” he said. In the end the builders chose five types of wood: beech, ash, ilex, elm and oak, all of which were available in Renaissance times and familiar to Leonardo.

Carlo Pedretti, head of the Armand Hammer Centre for Leonardo Studies in Los Angeles, said that scholars had dreamt of reconstructing Leonardo’s car since it was spotted in the Codex, which is held by the Ambrosian Library in Milan, by Girolamo Calvi, the leading Leonardo expert of his day 100 years ago. Efforts to build the car had been frustrated, however, by an “error of interpretation”.

“I had a flash of intuition while studying copies of some of Leonardo’s preliminary sketches at the Uffizi Gallery,” Professor Pedretti told The Times. He had enlisted the help of Mark Rosheim, an American space scientist and expert on robotics, to “figure out how Leonardo really intended the machine to function”. He said that earlier scholars had wrongly assumed that the leaf springs drawn by Leonardo in the upper section of his design constituted the “motor”.

In fact, they were meant to regulate the car’s movement, either by enabling a driver to steer the vehicle using levers rather than steering wheel, or by being “pre-programmed” to make the “self-propelled wagon” veer either to the right or to the left. This explained why earlier models, including one made in 1953 for the Leonardo da Vinci National Science Museum in Milan, had not worked.

Professor Pedretti said that propulsion was provided not by the leaf springs, which had no transmission connection to the wheels, but by coiled or spiral springs contained in two large drums set in the chassis above the back wheels. The springs were wound by a ratchet on the top and held in place until released by a “remote-control brake” pulled by string. The steering system involved “a sophisticated mech anism featuring petal cams”.

Signor Galluzzi said that Leonardo had probably intended his car to provide amusement at a courtly Renaissance entertainment, and that it had perhaps been initially designed to carry automata, or mechanical robots, rather than a human driver.

This did not, however, “diminish the value or fascination of the device,” Signor Galluzzi said. “In fact, it confirms the daring of his designs and his endless striving for far sighted innovation.”

Roberto Ronchi, commercial director of Maserati, said that Leonardo’s invention confirmed the Italian genius for automobile design and technology. Richard Gadarzelli, a spokesman for Fiat, said that the spring-driven car was unlikely to have commercial applications or to join other “alternative” research projects, such as electric or hydrogen driven cars: “Even if you used modern components and mat erials, and the device travelled say 100m or more, you would still have to get out and wind the thing up again. Although I suppose it might have the advantage of getting round Ken Livingstone’s (London) congestion charge.”

The revelation that Leonardo’s car really works means that it joins a long line of Italian alleged “firsts”.

An encyclopedia being prepared on the orders of the Government of Silvio Berlusconi claims that Italians invented radio, the telephone, the typewriter and the piano, but also the fax machine, the hydrofoil, the ambulance and, in 1854, the big innovation that passed Leonardo by: the internal combustion engine, allegedly first thought of by two Italian physicists, Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci.

Leonardo’s Automobile is on show at the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Piazza dei Giudici 1, Florence, until June 5.

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