Every time a properly ‘vintage’ car appears in these pages, a colleague remarks: “The problem with old cars is they all look exactly the same.”
Even as Autocar’s biggest history nerd, I find this difficult to totally refute, genre of car aside.
All had that same in-sweeping bonnet, terminating in a vertically oblong grille between two high-mounted, circular headlights, flanked always at the front and often at the rear by separate wings over the wheels. So when did this stop being the case?
You might propose the point when aerodynamics crossed over from the aeronautical industry and the resultant ‘streamliners’.
But the main thing that makes those cars look (relatively) modern is their wheels being situated within their bodies – and those developments weren’t mutually exclusive.
The first streamliner to make production, Edmund Rumpler’s Tropfenwagen (‘waterdrop car’) of 1921, had an appearance that Autocar described as “quite unconventional but not unsightly, with no externals whatsoever”, but in fact its wheels were still enclosed by no more than mudguards.
At the same time, two of his contemporaries, Aurel Persu and Paul Jaray, penned some ungainly streamliners with ‘enclosed’ wheels, but none ever came to fruition.
Then, in 1923, Ettore Bugatti left everyone gobsmacked with his new grand prix racer. Autocar said of the Type 32: “It’s entirely original so far as its outline is concerned.
The dominating idea is that of a deep-section aeroplane wing, with a dead-flat undersurface, and the entire car brought as near the road as possible.
The whole of the front end is enclosed, and except for the starting handle it is impossible for the onlooker to distinguish one end from the other.” We thought it “reminiscent of a tank”, and indeed that became its popular nickname.
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