The automobile itself has changed history. Not just the ability to move people quickly over distances that would have taken days before the car, but in the industries that sprouted up to manufacture, repair, power them, customize them, or even talk about them. Some models have been more influential than others, cars like the Model T brought motoring to the public, the Tesla has led the charge of popularizing the modern electric car. Often the automobile as a thing is the news. It has upheld economies and it has crippled others.

Occasionally, however, an individual car gets to make history or at least have a front row seat. With the automobile being so ubiquitous and ingrained in modern life, the car is prone to being at the center of some historic or infamous moments in the modern age. Some outlaws are defined by the car they've driven, some managed to define the car's image in the public. Some are unique creations that themselves are newsworthy.

When a car becomes tied to a historic event, a moment of change in our society, that car becomes a touchstone, a physical embodiment of a moment in time that reminds us, that connects us to that moment.

Here are some of the cars that had that front row to history, cars that became synonymous with a person or an event, or cars whose mere creation has been history itself.

20  The Beast

Redesigned for Obama's presidency, the presidential Cadillac limousine nicknamed "The Beast" is perhaps the most secure and advanced car on the road. Last year the Beast got a new upgrade for the 45th president and it's a car that would make James Bond envious.

The bulletproof glass is five inches thick, the armor is eight inches. How you unlock it is a state secret. Seriously. The car can be sealed against chemical attack, has armor underneath for bombs, and a fire suppression system in case any of that goes wrong.

If you make it mad, it also has bite. Armed with rocket launchers, smoke grenades, and shotguns, the car is able to fight back. Should the president be injured it also contains bags of his blood type to hold him over until they get to a medical facility.

19 Bonnie and Clyde’s 1934 Ford Deluxe

The Great Depression created some odd folk heroes. Like during westward expansion, outlaws became celebrities for people who felt powerless. Bonnie & Clyde became that kind of folk hero when an unsuccessful raid of their hideout turned up a roll of film of the gang goofing around and a poem by Bonnie Parker. Their crime spree, which included killing civilians and police alike, ended in an ambush where officers shot the stolen 1934 Ford V8 Deluxe over 160 times.

The police actually tried to charge the owner, Ruth Warren who had just bought the car a month before, $15,000 for the now shot up car to be returned. She had to sue to get it back. She leased it to county fairs for a while, until selling it to a death car roadshow for $3,500. Today the car sits in a Nevada museum where new fans, thanks to the 1967 Warren Betty film, can visit it.

18 Ted Bundy’s 1968 VW Beetle

To be sure the Beetle has had some troubled associations. Adolf Hitler used a national savings scheme promising Germans this "people's car" where citizens were encouraged and in some cases required them to buy stamps that they would trade for a car. Instead he funded a military and no Beetles were delivered.

In the sixties, thanks to an innovative advertising campaign the car became popular with American youth and for those looking for an affordable, quirky car.

Ted Bundy, one of the most notorious serial killers, used that friendly image to lure his victims. He had even removed the front passenger seat and interior door latch and had a way to shackle them to the floor to facilitate his crime.  When the police started to close in on him after getting pulled over in his murdermobile, he sold it to a teenager. Police were still able to find hair strands from victims in it after seizing it and Bundy was sentenced to death. The murder car was bought by one of the arresting officers and later sold to a museum in Tennessee.

17 Archduke Ferdinand’s 1911 Graf & Stift Double Phaeton

Some events are not just events, they are sparks that change the course of history. When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austria-Hungary empire, was killed in the disputed territory city of Sarajevo, the event sparked the began the first World War. Since that fateful day the car has been the subject of a fair bit of spooky speculation.

A writer named Frank Edwards, known for flights of fancy more grounded by spectacle than fact, created a sordid history of death and accidents that befell the car before it was destroyed. Except it wasn't, and it didn't. What is true, though, is an astounding coincidence. The car that was present at the outset of World War I carried a license plate that read A 1111 18. Armistice Day, which ended the war, was on 11 November 1918, or A(armistice) 11/11/18. Spooky.

16 James Dean’s Porsche

It's hard to imagine given the depth of his legend but James Dean starred in only three movies. Mostly appearing in television, he had just begun to make his mark in cinema. Like Steve McQueen to follow, however, McQueen had other passions. One of those was racing.

During the filming of Rebel Without a Cause Dean decided to up his game from the 356 he had been driving to the 550 Spyder. He had it spruced up by George Barris (of Batmobile fame) and showed off to Obi-Wan himself, Alec Guinness who's said to have predicted that Dean would kill himself within a week in that thing.

Like Fredinand's limo, stories of the car being cursed have followed it, with displays burning down, the car falling off and injuring or killing people, and race cars that took parts from it crashing. Today its whereabouts are unknown.

15 AJ Cowling’s White Bronco

It's the 'getaway' car that introduced 'slow speed chase' into the lexicon. After the murder of Nicole Brown-Simpson and Ronald Goldman police eventually closed in on their suspect, famous football player, actor, and Hertz spokesperson OJ Simpson. Simpson got in the white Bronco of friend AJ Cowling and threatened to kill himself while they negotiated Simpson's surrender in the famous slow-speed car chase carried by news networks across the country. Not specifically a death car (that would be Simpson's Hertz owned Bronco at his house that had the blood of the victims on it), it was instantly notorious.

Despite that, its plain common looks meant that it spent a decade nonchalantly stowed in a parking garage and no one knew. The car was eventually sold and is on display in the same museum as Bundy's Bug.

14 Muammar Gaddafi's Saroukh el-jamahiriya (Lybian Rocket)

One thing about dictators, they don't tend to think small. Despite never actually promoting himself past the rank of Colonel, Muammar Gaddafi decided he needed a way to tackle the growing problem of traffic fatalities in his North African country. The leader himself is reported to have spent "so many hours of his valuable time thinking of an effective solution" to this problem and this weirdly angular car was the result.

It's powered by a 230hp V6 and has vague safety features like airbags and electronic measures that were never really defined.

The car was set to be built in the capital city in 2009 shortly before things went south for the oddball dictator.

13 Bruce Reynolds Lotus Cortina

That time spent wondering what would be the best getaway car might not be wasted after all. In 1963 a group of British criminals masterminded a robbery so daring it got a name, in this case, the Great Train Robbery.  Mastermind Bruce Reynolds took no chances in choosing his getaway car, choosing the fast and nimble Lotus Cortina. The Cortina was a hoped up British Ford compact with racing suspension and a racing twin-cam racing motor from Lotus. While downright pokey by today's standards or even muscle car standards of the time, it's a nibble race car that held its own in touring car racing against Minis and Jaguars of the day.

The little white runner with its green stripe did its job, allowing Bruce to escape eventually to Mexico where he raised a family including a son whose band's song Woke Up the Morning served as the theme to The Sopranos. Reynolds was eventually arrested when he returned to England for a new opportunity. The car is in an anonymous collection now, having sold for over six figures.

12 Al Capone’s 1928 Cadillac 341A Town Car

It's not just presidents and Popes that have tricked out armored cars. The most notorious gangster of all time, Al Capone had an otherwise nondescript getaway car.

When Capone needed to get away in a hurry he jumped in his armor-plated Cadillac sedan.

Bulletproofing wasn't the only thing that made it an ideal getaway car. It was also equipped with a police siren to clear the road ahead, a rear light that would flip out to allow them to fire at pursuers, and one of the first police scanners ever installed in a car. Rumors abounded for a while that this was the same car as FDR but that turns out to not be the case. The car recently sold for $341,000 at RM Auctions, a fair bit over the otherwise unloved Cadillac's value of around $40,000.

11 Suge Knight’s 1996 BMW 750

The nineties rap scene produced its fair share of legends. With some of its most prominent performers celebrating a hardcore outlaw or 'gangster' lifestyle, for some, it was not an act and the violence of their lyrics played itself out on some of the players and performers. One of the most legendary moments is the shooting of Tupac Shakur.

While riding in Suge Knight's 1996 BMW 750 on their way to a club in Las Vegas, a white Cadillac pulled alongside the BMW and opened fire, four bullets striking Tupac and shrapnel injuring Knight before he was able to escape by stepping on the gas and engaging the powerful V12.

Suge Knight has since been embroiled in his own legal issues. The car is now being offered for sale in the neighborhood of $1.5 million with no word of any takers.

10 John Allen Muhammad's 1990 Chevrolet Caprice

The early 2000s were a bit of a tense time. Following the September attacks, there were a string of events that fed people's fear and eroded their sense of safety, from anthrax mailings and people trying to blow up their shoes. Most of these did not manage to amount to much of anything other than scaring people, but in 2002 a sniper started terrorizing the Beltway area near Washington D.C. At the time during the attacks little was known about the shooters except for their largely unremarkable car, a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice.

The car became so associated with the attacks that the film about them was called Blue Caprice.

Probably not the kind of advertisement Chevy wants for their longtime fleet car.

9 John Dillinger’s 1933 Essex Terraplane

One way to identify a successful crime spree is if it ends up inventing a law enforcement branch. That would be the case with John Dillinger and the FBI. Like Capone, Dillinger had a getaway car of choice, in this case, a 1933 Essex Terraplane.

Unlike Capone, however, Dillinger didn't rig up his with special armor. Dillinger was another Great Depression celebrity outlaw who was eventually caught hiding in a movie theater.

A week prior he had made a getaway in the Essex resulting in him getting shot in the leg. It was crashed in a field a week later and soon after Dillinger was arrested. The car lives in a crime museum in D.C. with the bullet holes still there.

8 Toyota War Toyotas

Let's set the stage. For lots of complicated reasons but mostly uranium, Libya entered into a border dispute with neighboring Chad. Airbases were established, international bodies were petitioned, armies were mobilized. Chad was terribly outgunned. Libya had tanks and aircraft and helicopters, Chad just had troops. Being a former French colony, France chipped in to the tune of 400 Toyotas, a mix Hilux pickup trucks and Land Cruisers. In what probably seemed like a crazy idea at the time, the Chadian troops mounted their anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons in the bed of the indestructible pickup and did something even crazier, they won.

In the first conflict, they took out 93 tanks and 33 infantry vehicles and in turn lost a whole 3 plucky Toyotas. The Toyotas also proved hard to hit from the air and within a month the conflict was over and Chad had its territory back. This became known as the Toyota War. Now the practice of putting weapons on regular cars is referred to as 'technicals'

7 Stefan Eriksson’s Enzo Ferrari

On February 21, 2006, a rare Ferrari Enzo disintegrated on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California. What at first seemed like a regular rich guy taking one more rare car off the map slowly started to unfold into a crazy story of graft and corruption centering around the Enzo's pilot. At the scene was the destroyed Ferrari which had turned out to be illegally imported and payments not made, a loaded clip from an unregistered gun, and a fake badge.

The driver, it turns out, was Stefan Eriksson (who had said at the time he was a passenger despite his blood being on the steering wheel), a Swedish mobster who was at the center of a video game company Gizmondo which had scammed investors out of millions.

The high profile nature of the wreck unraveled Eriksson's various scams and ended in jail time in the US and Sweden. There is a happy ending for the Enzo, however. Ferrari was not content to leave it destroyed and rebuilt a new one from the ashes of the wreck that took down a modern con artist.

6 Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson’s Winton

Some of the best things happen because of bets. In this case, a San Francisco doctor got a little braggy at a social club and decided to bet his companions that he could drive from San Francisco to the east coast. That doesn't seem like a big deal now, but this was 1903 and there were no interstates and in most of the country no proper roads. Even more, Nelson was just learning how to drive a car. He managed to convince a local mechanic and chauffeur to help him out.

Somewhere in Utah he added a dog to the team, complete with his own goggles. The trip took a little over 63 days and featured a litany of breakdowns and trials. The car, a Winton (the owner of which had already failed to cross the country himself), was nicknamed Vermont, it's final destination where it broke it's chain, the last part to break, as Jackson pulled into his garage.

5 Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster

It's possible that in the future Elon Musk will fight physical Googlebots in a flying suit of armor over the city of San Francisco. Comic book implications aside, the one-time co-founder of PayPal has turned his riches into a wish list of science fiction tech. Not content to run one groundbreaking tech company with Tesla and its love them or hate them electric cars, he also runs SpaceX, a private space company trying to fill the void left by the retired shuttle program. When the time came to test his heavy lift rocket he needed some cargo that was both disposable but also would provide good optics should the rocket work.

The cargo he chose was Musk's personal Tesla Roadster complete with a mannequin in a space suit evocative of the opening the movie Heavy Metal where someone drives a space Corvette.

So now, among all the other satellites circling the Earth, there's also a tech billionaires car. Because why not.

4 Paul Walker’s Porsche Carrera GT

What started off as a crib of the movie Point Break meant to capitalize on the import tuner scene has become a massive franchise on its own. Far from its street racers from Echo Park roots, The Fast & the Furious films embody fantasy go fast with car-themed heists and increasingly crazy stunts. At the center of this is federal undercover agent turned car themed heist man played by Paul Walker.

Having made his name in car movies, Walker lived the fast car life right to the end. While on a joy ride in a modified Porsche Carrera GT, Walker's friend Roger Rodas lost control of the car and hit a pole, killing them both. The culprit, aside from excessive speed, turned out to be older tires. Walker was replaced by his brother in the still unfinished seventh film in the series, which has since had an eighth and ninth installment coming up.

3 Janice Joplin’s Porsche 356

Janice might have once implored for the lord to buy her a Mercedes Benz, but when it came time for her to buy a car it was a Porsche 356. The car started as a used 1965 Cabriolet in plain white. But if this was going to be Janice Joplin's car it needed to reflect who she was and the time. So she asked one of her roadies, Dave Roberts, to give it a proper paint job. Titled 'History of the Universe', it was the kind of 60s mural you'd expect for a performer like Joplin.

At one point someone actually stole the distinct car and in an effort to hide the most recognizable Porsche of its time he spraypainted it grey. It was recovered and the mural restored.

Janice sitting on the hood with her arms reached out with her big smile is one of the most iconic images of the 60s.

2 JFK’s Lincoln 74A SS-100-X

There's a lot of ink in this world about John F. Kennedy's assassination. It seems rather obvious in light of the assassination that you wouldn't just have your president parading on top of a stretch Lincoln Continental limousine in broad daylight, and thanks to the assassination you'll never see that again. Even during presidential inaugurations, part of the ceremony is commentators breathlessly analyzing how long the new president walks outside the car driving up to their new office. In contrast to what we expect today, the car was not armored. At least at the time.

After the assassination instead of archiving the already expensive car, Ford and the Secret Service went to work armoring the car and returning it to service where it remained until 1977 when it was finally returned to Ford to live in the Dearborn museum.

1 Popemobile

Popes didn't use to travel all that much and as such didn't need much in the way of conveyance. When the Vatican gained its independence from Italy through an agreement with the government the Pope was given a new Fiat and the first Popemobile was born. While any car that the Pope uses becomes the Popemobile in the same way any plane the president is on becomes Air Force 1, the iconic white SUV style Popemobile didn't come into use until the 1980s.

Even Ferdinand Porsche has had a hand in designing a Popemobile for Mercedes-Benz in the 1930s.

After two assassination attempts, one in 1970 and one in 1981, the Popemobile began to become more like a bulletproof fishbowl. The armored Popemobile is only used in 'high risk' situations and the current Pope prefers a Popemobile with more access to the faithful.

sources: time.com, jalopnik.com, thedrive.com, businessinsider.com, roadandtrack.com