Queen of the Road

In 1934, to prove that a car without a chassis wouldn't fold up like a deck chair, Citroën drove one off a cliff.

Not a crash sled. Not a barrier test with instrumentation and high-speed cameras. A cliff. They found one, pointed a brand-new car at it, and let physics deliver the marketing message. The car landed, and it did not disintegrate, and that was the argument.

This tells you two things about the Citroën Traction Avant. First, that it was so far ahead of everything else on the road that the public genuinely did not believe it could work. And second, that André Citroën was not a man who did anything quietly — a personality trait that would, within a year, cost him his company and quite possibly his life.

The Traction Avant is one of the most important cars ever built, and almost nobody outside France talks about it that way. It doesn't have the Mini's cultural cachet or the DS's alien beauty or the Beetle's sheer numbers. What it has is something stranger: it invented normal. The basic recipe of the car in your driveway right now — front-wheel drive, no separate chassis, independent front suspension, hydraulic brakes — was assembled and mass-produced for the first time in Paris in April 1934.

Everything since has been a refinement.

What It Actually Was

Let's get the myth-busting out of the way first, because Citroën's own marketing department has been overstating this car for ninety years and it doesn't need the help.

It did not invent front-wheel drive. Alvis was building front-drive cars in Britain by 1928. Cord's L-29 arrived in America in 1929. DKW had the F1 in Germany by 1931, and Adler, Stoewer and Tracta were all at it too. It did not invent the monocoque, either — Lancia's Lambda got there in 1922.

What the Traction Avant did was put all of it in one car, and then build three quarters of a million of them.

The consequences cascade in a way that's genuinely fun to trace. No propshaft to the rear axle means no transmission tunnel, which means a flat floor. No separate chassis means the whole car sits dramatically lower — low enough that it needed no running boards to climb in, which is why it still looks like a car and its contemporaries look like sheds on wheels.

Lighter, too. Roughly a quarter lighter than comparable rivals. Which meant a 1.3-liter engine could push it to 100 km/h — 62 mph — while drinking around 24 mpg. In 1934 that was a genuinely modern set of numbers.

Citroën claims a hundred patents went into it. For once, the marketing department may be underselling.

The Two Men Who Drew It

The car makes far more sense once you know who built it, because neither of them was a car guy.

André Lefèbvre did the engineering, and he came out of the sky. He trained at Supéaero, France's aeronautical engineering school, and in 1916 went to work for Gabriel Voisin — an aircraft manufacturer who turned to building some of the most eccentric luxury cars of the 1920s. Aircraft engineers had understood for years that you could make a structure light and strong by making the skin do the work. Lefèbvre brought that idea to a family sedan.

Flaminio Bertoni did the shape, and he was a sculptor. Italian, trained in clay, and by several accounts the Traction Avant was the first car ever modeled rather than drawn. He would go on to shape the 2CV, the DS and the Ami 6 — which is arguably the greatest run of consecutive designs any car designer has ever had, and it started here.

The monocoque idea itself came from André Citroën personally, on a trip to America, where the Budd Company showed him a proposal for a car with no chassis. He bought the technology, came home, and understood immediately what it would do to everyone else.

The Banquet in the Empty Factory

Here is where the story turns from clever to reckless.

To build this car, Citroën didn't upgrade his factory. He demolished it. In March 1933 crews began tearing down the existing 30,000-square-meter plant on the Quai de Javel. Construction of the replacement started on 21 April. By the end of August the shell was up: four times the size of the building it replaced, using five thousand tons of structural steel.

They did all of this while continuing to build several hundred cars a day of the outgoing model. Read that sentence again.

And then, in October 1933, with the new factory built but completely empty, André Citroën invited six thousand guests to a banquet inside it. Dealers, agents, anyone who would be selling the car he had not yet finished designing.

At the time it read as confidence. Within months it read as hubris, because the following winter became a straight race to finish the car and tool up production before his creditors ran out of patience.

Dealers saw it privately on 23 March 1934. The public saw it on 18 April at Citroën's enormous Paris showroom. Volume production began on the 19th — the day after the launch, which is not how anyone would plan it.

The bodyshell, remarkably, came through the rush intact. The transmission joints and those brand-new hydraulic brakes did not, and early cars had problems with both. That is what a deadline looks like when it wins.

Eight Months to Bankruptcy

The car was a triumph. The company was finished.

Development plus a total factory rebuild had put André Citroën more than 150 million francs in debt — roughly seven million dollars in 1934 money, which is an amount that doesn't really translate except to say: catastrophic. In December 1934, eight months after the car went on sale, the company declared bankruptcy.

The largest creditor was Michelin, who had also been on the receiving end of Citroën's more creative approaches to paying suppliers. Michelin took the company and would hold it until 1976. The bankruptcy court required Citroën to resign; he stepped down on 31 January 1935. He died on 3 July 1935, aged 57, having never seen the car succeed.

There's a bleak irony in what happened next. Under Michelin, Citroën was run essentially as a research laboratory — a rolling test bed for radial tires and new engineering. Which is exactly the environment that produces the DS twenty years later. The discipline André Citroën never managed to impose on himself was imposed on his company the moment he was gone, and it made the company immortal.

How It Was Actually Built

Time for the engineering, and for a correction that most write-ups of this car get wrong — including, frequently, Citroën's own press material.

It is not a full monocoque. The Traction Avant uses a substantial front subframe that carries the gearbox, the engine and the front suspension, bolted to a unitary passenger cabin behind it. Semi-monocoque is the honest term. That subframe is doing real work, and it's also the reason a rusty Traction is a dangerous Traction — when the structure goes, the car sinks at the nose as the subframe pulls away from the body.

And the suspension is not independent all round. The front is: torsion bars and wishbones, genuinely advanced. The rear is a steel beam axle with a Panhard rod, located by trailing arms and sprung by torsion bars anchored to a 75 mm steel tube bolted across the platform. Citroën's marketing said four-wheel independent. It wasn't. It also didn't matter, because a torsion-bar beam axle in 1934 was still light years past the cart springs on everything else in the showroom.

The layout is the fascinating part. The gearbox sits at the very front of the car, ahead of the engine, with the differential between the two. Engine behind gearbox, well inside the wheelbase. That drops the center of gravity, puts weight over the driven wheels, and is a big part of why the thing handles.

It also puts the gear lever in an odd place. There's a handle protruding from the dashboard through a vertical H-gate — which sounds precarious, since gravity would happily drop you out of second on a bump. Citroën solved it by locking the mechanism whenever the clutch was engaged and releasing it only when you pushed the pedal. Combined with pendant pedals, an umbrella handbrake and a front bench, you got an interior with a completely flat, unobstructed floor. Three across the front, three across the back, in a car lower than anything else on the road.

That is why they became taxis. Thousands and thousands of them.

Naming It, and the Family That Followed

"Traction Avant" was never the official name. It's just French for front-wheel drive, and it stuck because that's what everyone called it. Officially the cars were named for their French fiscal horsepower band — the CV rating used to set annual road tax — which is why nothing quite lines up. The 7 stayed a 7 even when a bigger engine pushed it into the 9 CV band. The 15-Six was actually a 16 CV. Precision was not the point; tax was.

In France it earned a better name anyway: Reine de la Route. Queen of the Road.

Two body variants deserve their own mention. The Familiale stretched the wheelbase for three rows and nine adults, with a middle row that folded away entirely — a layout Citroën carried forward through the DS and CX Familiales all the way to 1991.

And the 11CV Commerciale has a strong claim to being the first hatchback ever built. Split tailgate, the lower half folding down into a loading platform with the spare wheel on it, the upper half cut into the roofline. Postwar it became a single top-hinged piece, which is exactly the arrangement on the back of a Golf today. Citroën sold it to grocers and butchers. They had invented one of the defining body styles of the twentieth century and marketed it at people who needed to move meat.

The Man Who Drove 400,000 Kilometers

Nobody remembers the Traction Avant for racing, and there's a reason: it didn't do much. If someone tells you it won the Monte Carlo Rally, ask for a source. The 1930s Montes went to Hotchkiss, Talbot, Delahaye and a Ford V8. Citroën's Monte victory came in 1959, with the DS-derived ID19.

What it did instead was endurance, and the headline act is one of the strangest achievements in motoring.

François Lecot was a restaurateur from near Lyon. In July 1935, aged 57, he set out to drive 400,000 kilometers in a single year in an 11CV, under the supervision of the Automobile Club de France.

He did it. Roughly 1,100 kilometers every single day for fifty-two weeks, running Lyon to Paris one day and Lyon to Monaco the next, on the RN6 and RN7. No highways. Averaging about 60 km/h. Ten hours at the wheel, four hours of sleep, an auxiliary 65-liter tank to cut down on fuel stops. He finished on 26 July 1936, having covered roughly the distance from the Earth to the moon in a family sedan.

The detail that makes it perfect: during his military service, Lecot had been formally declared unfit to drive.

He'd been at it before, too. In 1934 alone he ran a Tour of France and Belgium — 5,007 km in 77 hours — and the first Paris–Moscow–Paris postal run, 3,200 km in eight days. And that same summer, in a pleasing bit of range, the Traction Avant was also winning prizes at the concours d'élégance at Bagatelle and Deauville. Beauty contests and endurance records, same car, same year.

Lecot's later life was not kind. He lost his hotel during the war and died in a retirement home. There's a replica of his car in a museum near Lyon.

The Worst Decade in France, and the Car in the Middle of It

No car has a stranger moral record than this one, because between 1939 and 1945 the Traction Avant was driven by everybody, and several of those parties were trying to kill each other.

The French Army initially didn't want it — not enough ground clearance, they said — but about 250 were in service by September 1939, and as losses mounted Citroën supplied 570 more between February and May 1940.

Then France fell, and the production numbers tell the story better than prose does. The 11B-légère had built 27,473 cars in 1939. In 1940 it managed 4,415. In 1941, 2,032, before production stopped entirely. The Paris plant took serious bomb damage on 3 June 1940.

Requisitioned Tractions were re-registered with German WH military plates and gave, by all accounts, excellent service — in France, and also in Libya and at Stalingrad. The Gestapo used them in Paris, and a black Traction pulling up outside your building at night became one of the defining images of the occupation. People got into the back of those cars and were not seen again.

The same cars carried the Resistance. As the occupation collapsed, Tractions appeared all over France with FFI painted on their doors. American military police preferred them to Jeeps — more comfortable, more stable, and strictly against regulations.

And after the war they went to the other side again. The Gang des Tractions Avant operated out of Pigalle, assembled from surviving collaborationist militia, bent policemen and Resistance men who had discovered they liked the work. They were named for the car, which they chose because nothing else could outrun a police pursuit — and then the police bought Tractions too, and the whole thing became an arms race in identical black sedans.

Postwar production restarted slowly and shabbily: 1,525 cars in 1945, with painted headlight surrounds instead of chrome because there was no chrome. Inflation did the rest. An 11B-légère listed at 26,800 francs in January 1940 cost 110,670 by October 1945. And if you couldn't supply your own tires, Citroën charged you an extra 9,455 francs for a set of five, because there weren't any.

Until 1953, you could have any color you liked, as long as it was black.

The English Ones

Right-hand-drive cars were built at Slough, in England, and they're a genuinely different product. British import duty meant a car had to be 51 percent local content to avoid the tax, so the Slough cars got Lucas 12-volt electrics, a walnut dashboard with Jaeger instruments, Connolly leather and a wool headlining. A French industrial revolution, re-trimmed as a gentleman's carriage.

They were also renamed, confusingly, for the British tax system: the 11 Légère became the Light Fifteen, the long-wheelbase 11 the Big Fifteen, and the six-cylinder the Big Six.

There was even an American attempt. In the late 1930s, the Challenger Motor Car Corporation of Los Angeles imported Tractions and rebadged them as the Challenger. It went about as well as you'd expect.

The Gearbox That Won Formula One

And now the part almost nobody knows, which is my favorite thing about this car.

To make the Traction Avant work, Citroën had to build a cast aluminum alloy transaxle — gearbox and differential in one lightweight housing at the front of the car. It was radical for 1934, it contributed a serious chunk of the car's weight saving, and the tooling for it contributed just as seriously to the financial disaster.

Two decades later, in England, John Cooper was trying to solve a different problem. Cooper had worked out that putting the engine behind the driver was the future of racing car design, and he needed a transaxle light enough and strong enough to sit at the back of a Formula One car. Volkswagen's magnesium case was lighter but far too small to house the gears an F1 engine would destroy.

There was essentially one other candidate on earth. So Cooper used the Citroën Traction Avant transaxle.

The Cooper T43 took the first Championship Grand Prix victory ever scored by a mid-engined car, in 1958. The T45, T51 and T53 followed. The Cooper T51 won the 1959 Formula One World Championship. Within five years every serious constructor had moved the engine behind the driver, and the front-engined Grand Prix car was extinct.

It gets better. The Citroën casing had an awkward flaw: the input shaft sat high relative to the output shaft, so it couldn't be inverted without the oil level drowning an unreliable seal. That forced the engine to sit high in the chassis, which is the opposite of what a racing car wants.

Jack Brabham went to Paris personally, to the ERSA foundry, to discuss strengthening the case. What came out of it was the "ERSA Knight" — a spur-gear set mounted in the bellhousing spacer, an idea from Ron Tauranac, executed by Jack Knight. The gear set offset the shaft heights and let the engine sit lower.

That modification produced the Cooper T53 "Lowline", which made Brabham World Champion in 1960 — and it was the direct precursor to Brabham setting up as a constructor in his own right.

So: an aeronautical engineer's gearbox for a bankrupt French sedan became the foundation of the mid-engine revolution, two World Championships, and one of the great names in Formula One. Nobody planned any of that. It happened because in 1957 it was the only lightweight transaxle you could actually buy.

The Last Trick

By the mid-fifties the Traction Avant was old. It had gone from rakish in 1934 to slightly quaint by 1955 without changing much at all, which is what happens when you're twenty years ahead and then stand still.

But it had one more thing to do. In 1954 Citroën took the six-cylinder 15-Six and fitted self-leveling, height-adjustable hydropneumatic suspension to the rear axle — the first production car in the world to have it. There was a lever in the trunk to change ride height, a belt-driven high-pressure pump, a reservoir under the hood, and a dashboard override so the car wouldn't sink when you parked and loaded it.

It was a field trial, and everyone knew it. The following year, at the 1955 Paris Motor Show, Citroën unveiled the DS — and the entire car floated. Many of the 15-Six H's hydraulic parts interchange with early DS components.

The Traction Avant didn't just create the modern family car. On its way out the door it incubated the strangest and most beautiful Citroën ever built.

Production ended in July 1957, right after the cheaper DS-derived ID19 arrived to replace it. 759,111 cars over twenty-three years — including 26,400 from Slough, 31,750 from Forest in Belgium, 1,823 from Cologne and 550 from Copenhagen, and that total includes a four-year hole where there was a war on.

What It's Like Now

The remarkable thing about driving a Traction Avant today is how little allowance you have to make for it.

The steering — rack and pinion from 1936 onward — is direct and accurate and genuinely heavy at parking speed, and there are specialists who will fit power assistance if you're not precious about originality. The dash-mounted shifter looks alarming and takes about ten minutes to learn. The brakes work, and deserve respect rather than trust. The ride is soft in a way that feels distinctly Citroën even seventy years before anyone said the word hydropneumatic out loud.

And it corners. Classic & Sports Car, driving a hot-rodded example hard, found the understeer mild and non-threatening and admitted to being astonished by the agility of a four-door saloon pushing seventy years old. Top Gear rates the car nine out of ten and calls its importance impossible to overstate.

The enemy is rust, and it's existential rather than cosmetic. Get water into that structure and the car will eventually sag at the nose as the front subframe separates from the body. Inspect accordingly.

It has appeared in more than 1,300 films and television programs, which may be a record. From Russia With Love. The Sound of Music. Army of Shadows. Diva. And a black one, driven by two men in trenchcoats, in Hergé's The Calculus Affair.

The Point

There's a version of this story where the Traction Avant is a footnote — a clever French car that did some things early. That version is wrong, and the reason is sitting in your driveway.

Go look at your car. Almost certainly front-wheel drive. Certainly a unitary body with no separate chassis. Independent front suspension, hydraulic brakes, rack-and-pinion steering, a flat floor, a hatchback maybe. Every one of those decisions was made together, for the first time, and put into mass production, in Paris, in April 1934.

The Mini gets the credit for front-wheel drive winning. The Golf gets the credit for making it universal. Both of them were arguing a case that had already been settled twenty-five and forty years earlier by a company that went bankrupt proving it, and a man who died before it paid off.

Not bad for a car they had to push off a cliff to prove it was safe.