Classic Traction Avant Citroen Seen at Heart and Carburetor Meeting, Turin, Italy

This car was the first mass production model with front wheel drive.

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The Citroën Traction Avant is an executive car produced by the French manufacturer Citroën from 1934 to 1957. About 760,000 units were produced.

The Traction Avant, French for front-wheel drive, was designed by André Lefèbvre and Flaminio Bertoni in late 1933 / early 1934. While not the first production front wheel drive car (Alvis built the 1928 FWD in the UK, Cord produced the L29 from 1929 to 1932 in the United States and DKW the F1 in 1931 in Germany) it was the world's first front-wheel drive steel unitary body frame production car. Along with DKW's 1930s models, the Traction pioneered front-wheel drive on the European mass car market.

The Traction Avant's structure was a welded unitary body / chassis. Most other cars of the era were based on a separate frame (chassis) onto which the non-structural body ("coachwork") was built. Unitary construction (also called Unit Body or "Unibody" in the US) results in a lighter vehicle, and is now used for virtually all car construction, although body-on-frame construction remains suitable for larger vehicles such as trucks.

This method of construction was viewed with great suspicion in many quarters, with doubts about its strength. A type of crash test was conceived, taking the form of driving the car off a cliff, to illustrate its great inherent resilience.

The novel design made the car very low-slung relative to its contemporaries – the Traction Avant was always distinctive, which went from appearing rakish in 1934 to familiar and somewhat old fashioned by 1955.

The suspension was very advanced for the car's era. The front wheels were independently sprung, using a torsion bar and wishbone suspension arrangement, where most contemporaries used live axle and cart-type leaf spring designs. The rear suspension was a simple steel beam axle and a Panhard rod, trailing arms and torsion bars attached to a 75-millimetre (3 in) steel tube, which in turn was bolted to the main platform.

Since it was considerably lighter than conventional designs of the era, it was capable of 100 km/h (62 mph), and consumed fuel only at the rate of 10 L/100 km (28 mpg-imp; 24 mpg-US).

Investing for volume production

The scale of investment in production capacity reflected Andre Citroën's ambitions for the car. Site preparation began during the winter of 1932/33, and on 15 March 1933 work started on demolition of the 30,000 m2 existing factory. Construction of the new factory started on 21 April, and by the end of August the building's shell had been erected, four times the size of the factory that it replaced, and using 5,000 tonnes of structural iron and steel. All this was achieved while continuing to produce several hundred Rosalies every day. With characteristic showmanship, André Citroën celebrated by inviting 6,000 guests – mostly dealers and agents and others who would be involved in selling and promoting the car – to a spectacular banquet in the new and at this stage still empty factory, on 8 October 1933. Citroën's gesture quickly came to be seen as hubristic, as the ensuing months became a race against time to finish the development of the car and tool up for its production before his investors lost patience.

In the end the first car was presented at Citroën's huge Paris showroom on 18 April 1934, by which time principal dealers had already had their own private unveiling on 23 March. Although there had been much chatter and speculation, before April 1934 the details of the car had been kept remarkably quiet outside the walls of the Quai de Javel plant.[4] Volume production formally started on 19 April 1934.[4] Although the revolutionary unitary bodyshell was, according to most reports, not affected by the rushed launch schedule, problems with transmission joints and the hydraulic brakes – another "first" in a volume car in Europe – reflected the financial pressure to get the car into production as quickly as possible.

Variants

The original model was a small saloon with a 2,910 mm  wheelbase, and a 1,303 cc engine: this model was called the 7A. All the models have front suicide doors with rear conventional doors. After just 2 months, with about 7,000 cars produced, the 7A was succeeded in June 1934 by the 7B which used a higher-power engine of 1,529 cc (93.3 cu in) and provided two windscreen wipers in place of the single wiper on the original production cars). The manufacturer also took the opportunity to make a start on addressing some of the other initial "under the skin" teething problems.

By September 1934, 15,620 7Bs had been produced before it, in turn, was succeeded in October 1934 by the 7C with an even higher-output 1,628 cc (99.3 cu in) engine. The number "7" referred to the French fiscal horsepower rating, or CV of the original car, used to determine annual car tax levels: however, manufacturers did not change the model name every time a change of engine size caused a change in fiscal horsepower, with the result that the 7B's larger engine pushed it into the 9 CV tax band without triggering a change in the number by which the model was identified by Citroën.

Later models were the 11 (launched in November 1934), which had a 1,911 cc (116.6 cu in) four-cylinder engine, and the 15 (launched rather tentatively in June 1938[7][8]), with a 2,867 cc (175.0 cu in) six. The 11 was an 11 CV, but curiously the 15 was actually in the 16 CV tax band. The 11 was built in two versions, the 11BL ("légère", or "light"), which was the same size as the 7 CV, and the 11B ("Normale", or "normal"), which had a longer wheelbase and wider track.[9]

For 1936, at the 29th Paris Motor Show, in October 1935, various modifications were on show. At the front painted front grilles replaced chrome ones and the headlight covers were restyled. The changes at the back were more practical and involved an opening luggage hatch/lid: it was no longer necessary to clamber over the back seats to get at the luggage space at the rear of the passenger cabin (although the overall size of the luggage locker remained at this stage rather restricted). The opening boot/trunk lid made it necessary to reposition the rear-license plate, previously under most circumstances centrally mounted just above the bumper, and now mounted on the rear-wing on the left side.[5] On the original cars it had been possible to access the fuel tank using capped filler openings on either side, but now the left fuel filler cap was removed, and filling the fuel tank had to be done using the filler on the right side.

Two months later the radical "Pausodyne" suspension was modified, now incorporating conical rubber rings at the front. A further improvement across the range, introduced on 15 May 1936, came with the fitting of rack and pinion steering in place of the relatively imprecise "worm and roller" steering system. Despite Citroën's attention to the perceived shortcomings of the earlier Tractions, significant numbers of customers still opted for the manufacturer's old rear-wheel drive models which, in 1936, still accounted for more than 10 per cent of the factory's output.

Citroën planned two variants that never entered production, since there was insufficient funding to develop them, except as running prototype vehicles. One was an automatic transmission-equipped model, based on the Sensaud de Lavaud automatic transmission, the other a 22 CV model with a 3.8 litre V8. The transmission (which was actually originally designed for the Citroen) was a "gearless" automatic, using the torque-converter alone to match engine revolutions to the drivetrain revolutions, much like the Dynaflow Transmission introduced later in the USA. The car was supposed to have a less spartan interior than the other Traction Avants and it was to feature Citroën's own new V8 engine. About twenty prototypes were made, but the project was canceled at the start of 1935 after the company's bankruptcy and resulting Michelin takeover, which rapidly led to a level of financial discipline that the company had hitherto heroically failed to apply. The prototype 22CVs were probably all destroyed.

In addition to the 4-door body, the car was also produced as a 2-door coupé with a rumble seat, dickie seat, as a convertible also with a rumble seat, dickie seat and as an extended length Familiale, Family model with three rows of seats, seating 9 adults. There was even a hatchback-type Commerciale, Commercial variant, in 1939, well ahead of its time, in which the tailgate was in two halves, the lower of which carried the spare wheel with the upper opening up to roof level. A one-piece top-hinged tailgate was introduced when the Commerciale resumed production in 1954 after being suspended during World War II.

The 6-cylinder, 2876 cc model was used as a "Test Bed" for the introduction of the Hydraulic Suspension that underpinned the revolutionary Citroen DS19 that was launched at the Paris Motor Show in 1955. The Hydraulic suspension was fitted to the rear suspension of the "15-6 H" with a lever in the boot to permit the ride height to be modified. A dashboard-mounted override control was fitted to allow the rear suspension to be locked in normal ride height when parked, so the car did not drop in response to loading and unloading. It automatically released when the clutch was operated when driving off. A fan-belt driven high-pressure pump was added and an under-bonnet reservoir to hold the "LHS" hydraulic fluid. Many of the hydraulic parts were interchangeable with the early DS 19 models (which also had hydraulic disk brakes, hydraulically assisted steering and a hydraulically operated "semi-automatic" gearbox).

Sadly none of these other hydraulic features were fitted to the 15-6 H, which ceased production in 1956, one year after the arrival of the DS.