Citroën Traction Avant

The story

The Traction Avant sits low because there is no chassis underneath to perch on. Engineer André Lefèbvre carried aircraft thinking into a family car, Flaminio Bertoni modeled the body in clay, and the result needed no running boards, offered a flat floor for 6 adults and cornered like nothing else in the showroom. The gear lever sprouts from the dashboard, the steering is heavy when parking and faithful everywhere else, and the ride already has the soft, patient gait that would define Citroën for the next 50 years.

It was also a disaster of timing. André Citroën rebuilt his entire Paris factory to make it, went bankrupt 8 months after launch and died in July 1935, before the car had proved itself. The car outlived him by decades. It carried soldiers, occupiers, Resistance fighters and a notorious postwar gang that took its name, and its aluminum transaxle casing ended up in the Cooper Formula One cars that won the 1959 and 1960 world titles. Its final trick was a hydropneumatic rear axle on the 1954 15-Six, a rehearsal for the DS.