Forgotten Classic: Bucciali...Sometimes a Good Notion

Nowadays, a mind-numbing ninety years after its brief moment of fame, the Bucciali is the sort of car that shares concours lawns with the likes of rarities like the Alfa Romeo BATs in the background above.  Paul-Albert Bucciali, who had survived a bullet in the neck while flying reconnaissance missions for France, came back from the Great War to found a car-building operation with his brother Angelo. Their first efforts, spindly cycle cars powered by twin cylinder engines, appeared in 1922 under the Buc name.  By 1928 the brothers had set their sights on selling larger vehicles, and they exhibited the TAV 6 at the Paris Salon. Six years before Citroen's first front-drive car, their TAV (Traction Avant) featured a 2.4 liter Continental six driving the front wheels by means of a transversely-mounted transmission.  The brothers offered the Sensaud de Lavaud continuously variable automatic as well as their own 4-speed transverse manual gearbox, and showed off what would today be called a concept car at each year's Paris Salon, culminating with the crowd-pleasing Saoutchik*-bodied TAV8-32 shown above at the 1932 show. Unlike earlier Buccialis, the TAV 8-32 attracted a buyer as well as gawkers, and he wanted something more exotic under the hood than the American Continental inline 8.  So Bucciali sourced a sleeve-valve, 4.9 liter V12 from another aviator turned car builder, Gabriel Voisin*. The chrome stork decoration on the engine bay was an insignia from Bucciali's Air Corps squadron.  

Earlier, Bucciali had exhibited a TAV 16 Double Huit at the Paris Salon. The Saoutchik cabriolet body featured the same low-mounted Grebel headlights and stork emblem, along with a hood line level with the fender tops.  But here the hood concealed a mockup of a 16-cylinder engine using two Continental eights on a common crankcase.  The engine remained a mockup, and never received its moving parts.  

In 2012, a collector mounted a replica of this 1930 Saoutchik cabriolet body on an American Cord L-29 chassis, with the Cord's Lycoming straight eight powering the front wheels.  As original Bucciali chassis were unavailable, and as the Bucciali brothers had used American Continental engines, this doesn't seem too crazy.  As we'll see shortly, the brothers had ambitions of attracting an American manufacturer to build their designs under license, and actually came close.  And what happened to the Double Huit chassis?  In 1991 I encountered it on display at the the Schlumpf collection in Alsace Lorraine.  This vast collection is now the National Automobile Museum of France.

The display of this TAV 16 chassis near the museum entrance, along with the row of Mercedes-Benz GP cars, convinced me that the museum must indeed have one of everything, because experts had disputed the existence of any Double Huits, and here one was... 

One undisputed fact is that the Bucciali brothers had always viewed their firm mostly as a launching pad for ideas to be patented and then sold to larger manufacturers.  Also not in doubt is that by the end of 1929, Paul-Albert's wife was tiring of funding his car projects, and the brothers were seeking other sources of revenue.  So they  took an 8-cylinder car (the second chassis built) on a tour of American auto manufacturers starting in December 1929. These included Willys, Chrysler, Studebaker, GM, Peerless and others. The photo below shows the prototype, called La Marie, at the Peerless factory in Cleveland, which is where the brothers (wearing matching glasses) finally signed a deal...

The deal with Peerless called for Bucciali to sell Peerless cars in Paris, while the Ohio company readied a production car using the Bucciali front-drive system to enter licensed series production in Cleveland.  The drawings below relate to the granting of a patent by the US Patent Office in 1931.  

But the Great Depression was already thinning the ranks of American car manufacturers, and Peerless had just completed development of a V16 project; unlike the Bucciali sixteen, the engine in theirs ran but the stillborn project used up critical funds.   Peerless discontinued car production in 1931, and that was the end of their deal with Bucciali.  The appearance of the TAV8-32 at the 1932 Salon was the Bucciali brothers' last fling in the car industry.

La Marie has survived, and has been restored with Saoutchik bodywork donated by a Mercedes 680S (pictured in our Saoutchik* essay).  The cast alloy wheels match the other Bucciali show cars, and the flathead Continental 8 has the chrome fittings designed to disguise its humble origins.  Paul-Albert died in 1981, and claimed to have built three dozen cars.  Marque expert Christian Huet puts the number of chassis at 17, while other historians have been able to trace no more than 6.

And so after a handful or two of oft-rebodied chassis, and the failed attempt to link up with American industry, the Bucciali brothers ended their experiment in innovation.  For awhile the TAV8-32 lent its body to a Bugatti Type 46 that its owner (perhaps mistakenly) thought would be more reliable, but was reunited with its front-drive chassis and rare Voisin V12 engine in time to be displayed at Pebble Beach in 2006, where it stopped onlookers in their tracks, just as it had at the Paris Salon of 1932.

 

*Footnote:  For a brief history of body designs by Jacques Saoutchik, you may want to check out "The French Line Part 4:  Jacques Saoutchik----A Talent for Overstatement", posted on March 8, 2020.  Voisin's automobile designs are explored in "Architect-Designed Cars Part 3: Avions Voisin---Dreams From the Sky", posted  April 26, 2020.

Photo Credits:  

Top:  flickr.com
2nd:  Wikimedia
3rd:  classicdriver.com 

4th & 5th:  Wikimedia

6th:   prewarcar.com

7th:   A.P. Bucciali, from U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

8th:  Wikimedia

Bottom:  Wikimedia