Looking back at the 20th century, a century famous for massive manmade calamities, it's intriguing to note how often futurist optimism pops up. This may have been because people mired in one of two world wars, a global pandemic, or a worldwide depression had to assume the future could only get better, or because it was a time of rapid progress in technology despite, or maybe because of, all that conflict. As this blog is supposed to be about cars, and as the current pandemic affords time to sort through shoeboxes full of photos from car shows and museums, this might be a moment to round up some candidates in the contest for First Modern Car...
Vincenzo Lancia's Lambda, which appeared in 1922, is a contender. It was the first production car with load-bearing unitized body construction, which it combined with independent front suspension using sliding pillars and coil springs. The engine was the first production V4, with a narrow 14-degree angle and a single overhead camshaft. Engine sizes varied from 2.1 liters to nearly 2.6 during the car's 9-year production run. The construction system made it light; the '27 model at the Revs Institute above weighs just 1,720 lb. The spotlight barely visible in the above shot can be detached and used as a flashlight, another example of the Torinese engineer's practical thinking...
In Paris, André Citroen liked the unitized body idea, and unlike Lancia, made the roof part of the unit on his similarly low-slung Traction Avant. The first front-wheel drive car to be mass-produced, it became a hit with everyone from gangsters to the gendarmerie right after it appeared in 1934. Engines were initially inline fours (the 7 and 11 were named for their taxable horsepower) and starting in 1938, an inline six. Designers André Léfebvre and Flaminio Bertoni added 4-wheel independent suspension and rack & pinion steering to the low stance made possible by the unitized body-chassis. The car had a long production run ending in 1957, two years before the BMC Mini parked behind it appeared. The tranverse-engined, front-drive format of the Mini predicted the powertrain arrangement that would take over mass-market car design in the 1970s. Like the Traction Avant, the Mini featured unitized construction.
In Czechoslovakia at the same time, aerodymicist Paul Jaray teamed up with engineer Hans Ledwinka at the Tatra motor works to produce the Type 77, which made extensive use of light alloys in the rear-mounted, air-cooled V8 engine of 3 to 3.4 liters, and independent suspension with swing axles at the rear. The light alloy body panels were mounted on a steel platform chassis. The engine was of dry-sump design, and featured hemispherical combustion chambers. The advertising claims it is "the car of the future." Hundreds were built from 1934 to 1938, largely by hand, as Type 77 production overlapped that of even more innovative Tatra models...
The production car that caused a sensation at the New York Auto Show in November 1935 had a simpler greenhouse and straighter side section, but the simplicity and restraint of the design was like nothing else on display. The two-tone color scheme on the Westchester sedan below is atypical...
...and the car looked better in solid colors. Here an 810 sedan is parked in front of one of the streamlined travel trailers that appeared in the Thirties. The troublesome transmission meant the car was slow to enter production, and during a short career in 1936-37 the Cord 810 and supercharged 812 sold only about 2,300 cars.
Film maker Cecil B. DeMille and actress Marsha Hunt show off a 1936 Model 810 Phaeton. The supercharged 812 model appeared the next year and added another 45 hp to the Model 810's 125, but the external exhausts cluttered up the trademark "coffin nose". Cord's 810 is the cleanest American design of this era...
The same year the Cord 810 appeared, Tatra introduced its new Type 87, another comprehensive effort to envision the modern car. The new V8 was a 2.9 liter, and featured a single overhead cam per cylinder bank, retaining the dry sump of the Type 77. Visually, the car was hard to mistake for anything else, with a single dorsal fin splitting the compound curves of the windowless, one-piece engine cover. A tiny window in the panel separating the cabin from the engine room allows a bit of vision through the vented lid.
At the front, the triple headlights signaled the designer's resolute rejection of anything conventional, and the three-piece wraparound windshield provided a panoramic view for the driver.
The Tatra 87 and its predecessors provided enough engineering ideas for Ferdinand Porsche in his design of the Volkswagen Type 1 (the Beetle) that Tatra sued VW* in the postwar era, and won a settlement in the 1960s...
Aerodynamics were also on the mind of Giovanni Savonuzzi when he designed the Cisitalia 202 CMM (Coupe Mille Miglia) for fledgling car maker Piero Dusio in 1946. A small cabin, teardrop-shaped in plan and elevation, is inset above the exuberantly contoured alloy panels of the lower body. The hood plunges below the front fender peaks to a low-set air intake, and tall stabilizing fins emerge from skirted rear fenders. The curious bystander is probably reflecting that nothing like this has appeared at this Forties service station before...
The rear view shows off the talent of the panel beaters who formed those fins into aluminum. A boundary layer air control device appears, probably for the first time on a car, above the hinged rear hatch, also a novelty. All this effort was aimed at obtaining maximum performance out of a 1.1 liter (66 cubic inch) Fiat-based overhead valve inline four. The performance obtained was good enough to allow Tazio Nuvolari to take 2nd place overall in the 1947 Mille Miglia, at the wheel of a Cisitalia spider with similar fins.
The Cisitalia story* highlights that much of the progress made in the early postwar era was in aerodynamics and body design, while many auto makers took advantage of a seller's market by repackaging prewar chassis and engine designs...
The production model 202 coupe, also designed by Savonuzzi and built by Pinin Farina, was credited by historians as the template for what came to be called the GT car. An example was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art exhibit entitled "Eight Automobiles" in 1951, and MOMA acquired a specimen for their permanent collection. The light and elegant hand-built form of the Cisitalia came at the price of about two Cadillacs when new...
Over in South Bend, Indiana, Studebaker likewise emphasized body design innovation in their first new postwar car. As conceived by Raymond Loewy Associates with designers Robert Bourke and Virgil Exner on board, the 1947 Studebaker offered a startling new rendering of automotive form, if not in its chassis and engine design. The Starlight Coupes with their cantilevered roofs and wraparound rear windows were offered in base model Champions (shown) and the longer Commander chassis. The new envelope bodies were given new proportions, with much longer decks than prewar cars, and the modeling of forward-leaning rear fenders and front wheel openings imparted a sense of motion, as well as avoiding the slab-sided look of other envelope bodies. Despite comedians' jokes ("Which way is it going?"), the new Studebakers reached a wide audience, and the new style stayed in production through 1952, after which Studebaker replaced it with another groundbreaking design from Bourke at Loewy Associates.
It was Lancia, however, that first integrated a radically new engine and chassis design into a postwar production car. The Aurelia B10 Berlina first appeared in 1950, with a modern, all aluminum 60-degree V6 in front along with Lancia's famous sliding pillar front suspension. At the rear lived the clutch and a 4-speed transaxle, with trailing arm independent suspension and inboard drum brakes. The doors opened along the car's centerline, without a central pillar. The design provided performance (especially in the 2.0, 2.3 and 2.5 liter versions that followed the original 1.8), and unprecedented handling balance which allowed Lancias to beat more powerful cars in long-distance road races.
Beginning in 1951 Pinin Farina provided the shorter-wheelbase B20 coupe ('52 example above), and it became the prototype for the modern GT car. In 1954 PF released the B24 Spider, and in 1956 replaced it the B24 Convertible with winding windows shown below. A De Dion tube replaced the trailing arm rear suspension on the B20 in 1954; all the open cars had that feature. And all Aurelias reflected a kind of serious, practical (though costly) modern design approach that characterized a company run by engineers.
If the Lancia Aurelia was the most modern early postwar car in engineering terms, the Citroen DS 19 was perhaps the first modernist car. When the Traction Avant's design engineers Léfebvre (chassis) and Flaminio Bertoni (body) decided to surpass their masterpiece from 1934, they started with a clean sheet of paper for everything but the engine, which in deference to fuel costs was the 1.9 liter OHV four. Everything else might have come from a science fiction movie, including the 4-wheel independent hydropneumatic suspension with adjustable ride height, the disc brakes, and of course the front-wheel drive. An engine-driven pump provided power assistance to steering and brakes, and to the adjustable suspension. The transmission was unusual too; semi-automatic and clutchless, with shifting assistance provided by hydraulics. When first shown at the Paris Salon in autumn of 1955, the DS19 attracted crowds like no other car...
And it was a modernist car in the same sense that the steel and glass Case Study houses being built in California were modernist houses. Lines were aerodynamic, clean and spare, without reference to traditional norms or expectations, in the same spirit as Charles and Ray Eames' molded plywood chairs. Citroen's designers presented their drivers with a single-spoke steering wheel, avoiding the "lance effect" of earlier steering columns. In a similar way that modern architects adapted industrial components to housing, the DS19's rear fenders could be removed by undoing a single bolt, and the adjustable height control could be used when changing a flat...
In the Fifties and Sixties, Americans who drove Citroens lived in, or aspired to live in, these kinds of houses. They sat in Eames lounge chairs and read stories by Isaac Asimov, while listening to Dave Brubeck on their Heathkit stereos. They'd built those stereos from kits, because after all, they were engineers, or school teachers...like mine. She gave me my first ride in a Citroen DS.
The roof was formed in fiberglass while the body was steel. At the front, conventional grilles were eliminated, and air intakes were formed into the bumper and below it. The pillars framing the panoramic windshield are remarkably thin. The lights at the rear of the roof were provided to catch the attention of following drivers, and distract onlookers from a drop in height between the rear roof surface and the rear window.
Later versions included Chapron*-bodied coupes and convertibles like the one below, a less costly ID19 with manual 4-speed gearbox, and break (station wagon) models. Larger engines, still inline fours, were eventually offered in 2.1 and 2.3 liters.
Even though the DS had relatively limited influence on the design of cars that were not CItroens, its 20-year production career as essentially the same design makes it a strong contender for the most successful (and in engineering terms, perhaps the most obsessive) modernist car, if not the first modern one. Floating along the boulevard in a DS, it was hard to deny the notion that engineering innovation had already made the world a better place, and that we were somehow already living in the future...
*Footnote: In these posts, Hans Ledwinka's designs for Tatra, and Tatra's successful postwar lawsuit against VW, are reviewed in "Cars & Ethics: A Word or Two on VW", from 11-27-15. Cisitalia was the focus of "The Etceterini Files Part 11: Fiats as Fine Art", from 4-22-17. Chapron-bodied Citroens and other French makes are featured in "The French Line Part 3: Henri Chapron", posted on 2-12-20.
Color Photo Credits:
All color photos are by the author.
Monochrome Photo Credits:
Tatra Type 77: Tatra Works (now Tatra Trucks a.s.)
Tatra Type 77: Tatra Works (now Tatra Trucks a.s.)
Cord 810 Prototype: angelfire.com
Cord 810 Weschester rear view: Auburn Cord Duesenberg Club (www.acdclub.org)
Cord 810 Phaeton: paper-dragon.com
Cisitalia 202 CMM front view: wikimedia commons
Cisitalia 202 CMM rear view: Danville Concours d'Elegance
Cisitalia 202 CMM rear view: Danville Concours d'Elegance
Cisitalia 202 advertising: Cisitalia Automobili
1947 Studebaker: The Studebaker National Museum
Lancia Aurelia B10 Berlina: imcdb.org
Eames Lounge Chair: Herman Miller
1947 Studebaker: The Studebaker National Museum
Lancia Aurelia B10 Berlina: imcdb.org
Citroen DS-19 overhead view with crowd: revivaler.com
Citroen DS 19 dash: en.wheelsage.org
Citroen overhead front view: netcarshow.com
Case Study 9 House: br.pinterest.comCitroen DS 19 dash: en.wheelsage.org
Citroen overhead front view: netcarshow.com
Eames Lounge Chair: Herman Miller
It's interesting that you've included contenders dating back to 1922. I probably would've started in the 50s myself. 'The Last Antique Car' might make a fun companion post.
ReplyDeleteHmm, an interesting thought. Just off the top of my head, I'm guessing The Last Antique Car might have been British, and built in the 50s too...
ReplyDelete