Citroën Traction Avant
executive car produced from 1934 to 1957
The Citroën Traction Avant (French pronunciation: [tʁaksjɔnaˈvɑ̃]) is the world's first mass-produced, semi-monocoque bodied, front-wheel drive car. A range of mostly four-door saloons and executive cars, as well as longer wheelbased "Commerciale", and three row seating "Familiale" models, were produced with four- and six-cylinder engines, by French carmaker Citroën from 1934 to 1957. With some 760,000 units built, the Traction Avants were the first front-wheel drives made in such (six-figure) quantity.
Whilst front-wheel drive and four-wheel independent suspension had been established in production cars by Auto Union, and subsequently by others a few years prior – the Traction Avant pioneered integrating these into a mass-production car with a crash resistant, largely unitary, monocoque body. Additionally, the car was also an early adopter of rack and pinion steering.
Although the car's name ("Traction Avant" literally means "front traction") emphasized its front-wheel drive power delivery, the car stood out at least as much by its much lower profile and stance – made possible by the absence of a separate vehicle frame or chassis under the car's mostly unitary body – sharply distinguishing it visually from its taller contemporaries.
History
The Traction Avant, French for front-wheel drive, was designed by André Lefèbvre and Flaminio Bertoni in late 1933 / early 1934.
The Traction Avant was a recent entrant into the growing European front-wheel drive market, competing with the well established DKW F2 and Adler Trumpf models and joining other entrants at around the same time such as the BSA Scout. Front-wheel drive had appeared in the previous decade through luxury vehicle manufacturers Alvis, which built the 1928 Racing FWD in the UK, and Cord, which produced the L29 from 1929 to 1932 in the United States. Ultimately, the inline engine, front wheel drive layout of cars like the Citroën Avant was to be a dead end.
“Citroën Traction Avant” enters the record as executive car produced from 1934 to 1957. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Citroën, Traction and Avant can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q867560. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1934, 1957, 1933 and 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “Citroën Traction Avant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.