André's Death and the TA (1933-1945)André's Death and the TA (1933-1945)
The genesis of the TA idea was perhaps two-fold inspired. First was the
front wheel drive, integral chassis-body prototype built by Joseph Ledwinka
of Philadelphia's Budd Company in 1931. Second was the fwd prototype conceived
a year earlier at Issy-les-Moulineaux by Gabriel Voisin and André
Lefèbvre with a 3.2-litre Knight engine, Cotal gearbox and no differential.
An ocean separated these independent ventures, but both can be linked to
Citroën. In 1923 André Citroën bought a Budd patent for
an all-steel body and adapted it for mass production. Bodies were initially
built by Budd in Philadelphia; then after the Budd-assisted setting up of
a plant in France and the shipping of the dies, Citroën made the stampings
itself. André Citroën had made several trips to America, visiting
Budd apparently each time and though Bill Muller had left Budd by 1931 (for
his own front wheel drive Ruxton adventure) he recalled to Automobile Quarterly
that André Citroën did visit Budd that year. Doubtless he and
the Citroën officials with him saw the Ledwinka prototype then. However,
when it came time for the design of his new car, Citroën stayed at
home; he hired André Lefèbvre for the project. Production
plans for the Voisin prototype had gone awry, and in their wake Lefèbvre
had gone away - first to Renault where he found the ambience "stultifying,"
then to Quai de Javel. He, with associate Maurice Sainturat, came up with
the TA. Though inspiration for its parts may have derived from the previous
prototypes, the whole was an all-new design. As such, some aborning problems
were to be expected. But the TA had more than its share.
The trouble was that André Citroën was never an enthusiastic
driver yet he was far too keen a gambler, in public and in private. Privately,
he lost huge piles of his own and his company's fortune across the green
baize at Deauville and Monte Carlo; publicly he risked even larger sums
on new and unproven ideas, or on buying foreign patents at inflated prices.
And this is exactly what happened with the TA. The car was complex enough
to begin with: it had a completely new underslung and carefully streamlined
body-chassis unit-based on a sheet steel platform to which the body stampings
were welded-years ahead of its time, a short stroke 1529 cc overhead valve
engine and torsion bar rear suspension, not to mention all the intricacies
of front wheel drive.
But for André Citroën this was not enough. He had fallen
in love with the idea of a smooth and efficient automatic transmission,
and he wanted to employ a system called the Sensaud de Lavaud, after its
inventor. This used a complicated amalgam of awash-plates and hydraulic
couplings, and although it performed well enough for André Citroën's
own gentle, reflective cruising along the avenues of the Bois de Boulogne,
it was to prove fatally weak under stress. This in itself may have been
curable, but time was running out for André - cash was in short supply,
thanks to declining sales of the Rosalies. A run of bad luck at the gaming
tables, plus the effects of a long and bitter lockout at the Citroën
plant in the previous year, when he had tried to introduce cuts in wages
to make up for declining orders, added to the difficulties. By the beginning
of March 1934, the firm was short of 150 million francs to meet its short-term
commitments. Citroën tried hard to raise the cash, and in desperation
arranged a demonstration of the new 7 cv TA for the interested financiers.
All went well until the de Lavaud automatic box fell to pieces before their
horrified eyes. Next, Citroën tried his own dealers who rallied to
the double chevron and finally succeeded in raising the cash between them.
But by then the position had become worse, the bills had mounted and the
financial crisis was becoming more and more obvious, until finally the public
authorities stepped in.
For André Citroën, this was the end of the line. Michelin, as
Citroën's largest creditor, was invited to take over the running of
the company, and André himself was pensioned off. His life's work
taken from him, he lapsed into unwilling retirement. Inside a year, he fell
ill and, lacking the will to resist, he declined quickly. On July 3rd, 1935,
he died.
By any standards, André Citroën had been a remarkable man. In
a sense, his whole life was a gamble: like any successful trailblazer, he
needed the faith and the iron nerve to back his own judgment. He took risks
in leaving the army to start turning out gearwheels, in switching from gears
to munitions and finally to cars. In the progressively more competitive
field of mass production he had done well, with every prospect of doing
better still with more radical designs and greater experience. But his fatal
flaw was in stretching his gambling to the world of the casino as well as
that of the marketplace. Here he was switching from a trade he knew to the
blind workings of fortune - he threw away all the advantages of his knowledge
and skill and experience, choosing instead to rely on the purest of luck.
And it failed him in the end. Had he not lost so much of the money he had
made during the good years, he could have survived the occasional crisis
like the birth of the TA. But once the money had gone, his fate was inevitable.
Even had the de Lavaud transmission worked perfectly from the start, his
gambling would have gone on, and the next serious crisis would have finished
him just as surely.
So André Citroën was lost to the company which carried his name
- yet his influence still pervades it to a degree unequalled anywhere else.
His tradition of progressively more advanced design has been taken still
further by his successors. And so has another of his greatest gifts - his
astonishing talent for publicity. Long before it became a tried political
gambit, Citroën had invented the controlled leak. Each new model was
preceded by months or even years of the wildest guesses and rumours, fed
by carefully obscure quotes from the company. He pioneered test drives for
would-be customers, with no less than fifty demonstration Type A's at the
1919 Paris show. He bought the back pages of France's biggest daily papers
for Citroën announcements, he had the Citroën name blazoned on
posters and road signs, and etched in lights down the sides of the Eiffel
Tower (where Lindbergh was to see it in the distance as proof that Paris
was at last in sight), and scrawled in coloured smoke across the sky by
intrepid aviators. He loaded his cars with ten-ton weights to prove their
strength, dropped them from clifftops to show how they absorbed impacts
and photographed the remains, and he sent them on the longest and toughest
journeys imaginable. Starting with the first motor crossing of the Sahara
desert from Algiers to Timbuctoo in 1922, he used special Citroën cars
modified with a half-track conversion kit perfected by Adolphe Kegresse,
former garage mechanic to the Czar of Russia. The Croisière Noire
followed, an eight-month 17,000-mile haul from Colomb-Bechar to Antananarivo,
the Croisière Jaune 7500 miles across Asia from Beirut to Peking
through the Himalayas, the Gobi desert and a full-scale revolutionary war
in China proper; the Croisière Blanche from Chicago to Fort St. John
in the Arctic north - and a host of equally hair-raising trips.
Private owners entered into the spirit of things: a hotel keeper from
Rochetaillee called Lecot drove a Citroën 3-1/2 ton bus with a fanatic
long-distance driver called Lamberjack and twelve passengers in the 1934
Monte Carlo Rally without incurring a single penalty point. The following
year Lecot started a self-imposed solo marathon from Paris to Monte Carlo
and back, time after time, day after day, in a Citroën TA. Each night
he ate dinner and went to bed in his own hotel, each day he was out on the
road again. Month after month he kept on going, taking another Monte Carlo
Rally in his stride, and in just over a year he notched up 400,000 kilometres,
a record which still stands to him and his unbreakable TA.
From 1932 onwards, Citroën had produced his own Almanac - a pocket
reference book of facts and figures of interest to every owner. He founded
his own insurance company, with special low premiums for Citroën owners,
and he built up a vast dealer network - 5000 agents, who agreed to deal
exclusively in Citroëns from as early as 1925. Two years earlier, André
Citroën had set up his own toy factory, producing accurate 1/43rd scale
models of his production cars, and two years before that he started his
own taxi company in Paris. In 1932 he opened what was then the world's largest
servicing depot at Lyon. Ten years earlier, his owner's manual and repair
catalogue had established fixed prices for routine operations. Oddly enough,
the only publicity area he left alone was motor racing. The company only
entered Le Mans once, without finishing, in 1932, and the only Citroën
to enter the Targa Florio - in 1926 - broke down in the first half of the
race. Just about the only real sporting victory in the André Citroën
years was in the 1930 Morocco Grand Prix, when Citroën C 6's came in
first, second and third in their class.
Yet even now, with André gone from the helm, the company was still
very much alive. Chronically short of cash it may have been, but he left
it a tight, efficient and still potentially profitable organization, built
up by a shrewd mastermind. Back in 1919 General Motors' Alfred P. Sloan
had toured France looking for automobile factory bargains. Still uncommitted
to the cause of the motorcar, André Citroën had shown his interest
in being bought out, but Sloan backed down on the grounds that the factory
itself was in poor condition, a reason he later used to back out of taking
over Austin in England. When Sloan saw what a bargain he had missed, and
tried again ten years later, it was still no deal - from the other side.
By then, Citroën wasn't going to see his beloved company taken over
by anybody. And by a sad touch of irony, the man who did take him over in
1934 wanted nothing more than a chance to retire quietly. The tragic figure
of Edouard Michelin, still head of the family firm at the age of seventy
four, had already retired once three years earlier, handing over to his
son Etienne, who was killed in a plane crash a year later. Back went Edouard
to the family business. Two years later, his brother André died,
and his assistant Pierre Boulanger went to superintend the Citroën
takeover. Only when his second son Pierre was old enough to take his place
was Edouard able to retire for the second time in 1935. And two years later
Pierre too was dead, killed in a crash at the wheel of his Citroën
- the second of a total of four members of the Michelin top brass to die
in a Citroën since 1936 - and back came Edouard for the third time.
His grandson François was next in line of succession, but he was
only able to take over in 1940, leaving the eighty-one-year-old Edouard
free to go home at last. Worn out, he was dead in a few short months.
Perhaps this is one reason why the Michelin takeover made so little difference
to Citroën. Every car firm has to suffer the loss of its original creator
and driving spirit sooner or later. In all too many cases, the originality
and freshness of youth declines into running by over-large committees of
accountants, or an outright takeover by a competitor who stamps out all
the old individuality before adding another company badge to his line of
identical models. But Michelin was a creditor, not a competitor - an important
distinction - and Citroën's continued profitability could do it nothing
but good. The executives Michelin put in control were management men, not
rival carmakers with ideas of their own to push instead. So in the vital
fields of design and marketing, the highly professional team André
Citroën had built up around him was left free to carry on as before
- and free of poor André's extravagances, the company was set for
its biggest success so far.
Shorn of the temperamental de Lavaud transmission, the TA was ready for
lift-off at last. Three versions were introduced in May of 1934, the 7 A
with a new 1303 cc overhead valve wet-liner four-cylinder engine developing
32 bhp at 3200 rpm, the 7 B with a wide-bore 1529 cc version of the same
unit for 35 bhp at 3200 rpm, and the 7 S with a lengthened-stroke version
stretched to two litres and 42 bhp at 3800 rpm. And these would be followed
by the 1628 cc 36 bhp 7 C. Two optional bodies were offered in addition
to the monocoque Berline which was to become as familiar a shape as Porsche's
VW Beetle - a two-seater cabriolet and a 2 + 2 convertible. Two months later,
the 11 A (1911 cc, 46 bhp at 3800 rpm) emerged with larger bodywork in five-door
sedan and nine-seater versions - and after all the chopping and changing
of models and types of the previous fifteen years, that was that. André's
exotic plans for a V-8 version using two 11 cv blocks at 90 degrees in a
range of six special bodies was dropped as the gamble it was after only
twenty prototypes had been made, some using Ford V8's as stopgaps. From
now on, Citroën and Michelin were going all the way with the basic
TA. From here on in, it was mass production first, last and all the time,
with detail changes only for nearly a quarter of a century.
When The Autocar subjected the new saloon car to a full road test, they
approached it with some curiosity, wondering if Citroën had overcome
fwd's renowned hill climbing difficulties. They were pleasantly surprised.
The Traction Avant easily surmounted the road testers' steepest gradient
and could be stopped on the incline and restarted again with no difficulty.
The magazine's drivers also enjoyed the car's supple suspension which allowed
it "to be driven at amazing speeds over a pot-holed 'surface' that
you would take at not more than a cautious 20 mph on the average car."
Further, the comfortable machine with its flat floor and leather seats exhibited
a sports-car-like stability in turns and its flexibly mounted engine enabled
a quiet 50 mph cruising speed. Top speed for the test car was just over
61 mph and though larger models of the Traction Avant could reach 70-75
mph, straight-line speed was never the car's forte.
As the years passed, the new car was the subject of increased refinement.
Nineteen thirty five was the year of new universal joints for the drive
shafts. Nineteen thirty-six saw new instruments, rack and pinion steering
and a modified hood; 1937 a coupé version; 1938 new tires, a higher
compression option and the Munich crisis; 1939 a new heater and the start
of World War 11; and 1940 a higher compression ratio still and the German
occupation of France.
