Talk:Citroën Traction Avant
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Small correction but credit where it is due? The Traction Avant was designed by Flamino Bertoni who went on to work his artistic genious on the stunningly beautiful DS. Leferbre was the equally brilliant chief engineer on the same projects.Thank you R.W. Imes.
Isn't this model also known as "Citroën Légère?" --130.92.9.57 14:52, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
The term "légèr(e)" means "light". This term was applied to the 11L, only one of many models. Groogle 04:45, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] External links
I have a book called "Traction Avant: Toute l'histoire" ("Front wheel drive: the whole story") by Olivier de Serres, published in 1994 by Editions E/P/A, from which I have extracted some of the details of the updates I have just made to the main page. The mention of the sun roof on the Slough-built cars is from my own recollection: I had four of them (three 11L/light 15, one 11/big 15). None of them had a sun roof. Groogle 04:45, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
This article states that the "traction avant" was the first front wheel drive car in large scale production. However, 4300 DKW F1 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DKW and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:DKW-F1.jpg) front-wheel cars were sold as early as 1932 - surely large-scale production for thoses days. This was followed by a line of cars that went on to the three-cylinder, two-stroke FWDs which were built in west Germany up to the 1960s and survived up to the end of the GDR in the Wartburg and Trabant. Source: http://www.derzwickauer.de/automuseum_frontantrieb.html GernotHir 17:30, 17 April 2007 (UTC)GernotHir - April 17 2007
- I agree with you. Even if 1934 (or 33? article not totally clear and I certainly wasn't alive to notice) was the Traction's launch year, I do not imagine the volumes produced by Citroen were so high in the car's early years, while they were still offering the relatively conservative Citroen Rosalie series, and the business was in a bad way financially pending the Michelin takeover. What annual volume constitutes 'large scale production' is, of course, unavoidably subjective. I wonder if there are any statistics anywhere as to how many Tractions were produced (or if that's not available, how many were sold / registered) in 1934, 1935, 1936 etc. Was there a French version of Flensburg in the 1930s? Probably not. Equivalent thoughts apply on DKW 1930s production stats.
- Something someone wrote about the Cord also tends to qualify the bold statement about the Traction. It WAS a brilliant car in several important ways; and certainly it doesn't need the potentially contentious unqualified assertion on which you picked to sustain its reputation as an innovative milestone for the auto industry. Presumably a less contentious wording for the article here would involve something along the lines of the phrase '...one of the first front wheel drive cars in large scale production...' I wonder if anyone will have the energy / conviction to make that edit? Might be useful wait a bit to see if anyone comes back with the 1930s production stats for the Traction or for the DKW first. I guess that might swing the discussion? Charles01 (talk) 17:51, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
- You are right (GernotHir and Charles01), so I changed the text now. The Citroën Traction Avant was one of the most important cars with front wheel drive in the 1930s, but not the only one and not the first one. Production figures of DKW F1 through F8 (1931 to 1942) were 218.000, according to Werner Oswald, Deutsche Autos 1920 bis 1945, ISBN 3-87943-519-7, page 86. 84.140.3.98 (talk) 19:45, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
