Simca Aronde

The Simca Aronde is an automobile which was manufactured by the French automaker Simca from 1951 to 1964. It was Simca's first original design (earlier models were all to a greater or lesser extent based on Fiats), as well as the company's first unibody car. "Aronde" means "swallow" in Old French and it was chosen as the name for the model because Simca's logo at that time was a stylized swallow.

The three generations

There were three generations of the model: the 9 Aronde, made from 1951 to 1955, the 90A Aronde, made from 1955 to 1958, and the Aronde P60, which debuted in 1958 and continued until the model was dropped in 1964. Some 1.4 million Arondes were made in total, and this model alone is largely responsible for Simca becoming the second-biggest French automaker at the end of the 1950s.

Simca 9 Aronde

The first Aronde debuted in the spring of 1951 but initially only a few hundred pre-production cars were distributed to carefully selected "guinea-pig" buyers, and the full production version was finalised only in time for the Paris Motor Show, becoming available for sale in October 1951. The full production version incorporated various detail changes when compared to the pre-volume production cars, including a changed material for the seat covers and a moulded plastic dash-board which at the time appeared very modern when compared to the metal dashboard on the Aronde's most obvious competitor, the Peugeot 203. A few months later, at the start of 1952, space was found to position the battery under the bonnet/hood: in the earliest cars the battery was stowed under the front seat.

The Aronde was fitted with a front-mounted 1221 cc 44.5 bhp (33.2 kW) engine from the previous Simca model, the Simca 8, fuel feed being provided by a Solex 32 carburetor. Power was delivered to the rear wheels via a traditional four-speed manual gear box incorporating synchromesh on the top three ratios.