Editor’s note: Ryan Chirnomas is a patent attorney and classic car enthusiast in Washington, D.C. In this series, he examines the intersection of those fields by looking at design patents—which protect aesthetics rather than functionality—of the forgotten and forgettable in automotive history.
There are some things, like wine cheese and romance, that the French do like none other. In the 1930s and 40s, the French managed to do streamline automotive styling better than anyone else, and talented designers drew up countless breathtakingly beautiful creations, most notably from coachbuilders such as Figoni et Falaschi, Pourtout and Saoutchik.
One such designer was Jean Andreau. An engineer by training, Andreau began experimenting with wind tunnels in the early 1930s. In 1935, Andreau teamed up with WWI flying ace, Olympic athlete, inventor, racing driver and playboy Andre Dubonnet to develop the Dubonnet Dolphin. The Dolphin was a bizarre machine, with Isetta-style front hinged doors, a mid-ship V8, and a huge central dorsal fin. It was not a success, and is not known to have survived.
The 1935 Dubonnet Dolphin, as featured in issue two of Special Interest Autos.
Later, Andreau carried over the dorsal fin design to concept based on Peugeot’s already somewhat streamlined 402. At the 1936 Paris Motor show, Peugeot and Andreau claimed that the aerodynamics of the 402 N4X yielded a 30-percent bump in fuel efficiency, and a 40-percent higher top speed. The car never went into production, but fortunately survives today in Peugeot’s corporate museum.
1936 Peugeot N4X. Photo courtesy kitchener.lord.
Most streamliners were not, however, for the bourgeoisie. Being based on high-end cars like Delahayes, Delages, Talbot-Lagos and Peugeots, streamlined cars commanded a high price for the well-heeled. But Andreau’s next project, with Strasbourg-based Mathis, could have changed all that and brought a streamlined design to the masses.
Virtually unknown today, Mathis was at one time the fourth-largest manufacturer in France. After some success building Fords under license as “Matfords,” founder Emile Mathis turned his eye to the economy market for post-war production. Based on his previous streamlining efforts, Mathis recruited Jean Andreau for the project, and in 1940 development began in earnest.
In the resulting design, Andreau retained the principles of the teardrop-shaped body, but gone was the dorsal fin of the Dolphin and the N4X. High-speed stability was not a relevant concern.
The project was codenamed Voiture Economique Légère 333, a light economical car with three wheels, three seats and three liters of fuel consumption per 100 kilometers (that’s 78 mpg in American money). Reportedly, nine or ten prototypes of the VL 333 were built.
The VL 333 had a ground-breaking all-aluminum monocoque chassis. This was of course for weight savings (the car weighed about 850 pounds), but was also commercially advantageous since aluminum was more readily available than steel during and shortly after the war. Just to put into perspective how innovative this was, the first all-aluminum production car—the Acura NSX—was put on sale 50 years later.
What powered the little teardrop-mobile was interesting as well. The prototypes used a water-cooled flat-twin 707 cc engine good for 15 horsepower. Again, no need for a dorsal fin for high-speed stability! Interestingly, the engine included one radiator for each cylinder, with the radiators each being positioned behind the left and right grills.
Perhaps a bit awkward looking from the front, the VL 333 featured a striking shape from overhead, perhaps one of the purest embodiments of streamlined, teardrop automotive design ever.
Unfortunately, the war complicated things. Shortly after the project began, the Nazis invaded France, and the project had to be carried out in secret. Mathis was a persona non grata and fled to the U.S., where he spent the remainder of the war manufacturing munitions for the U.S. Navy.
However, reports of the secrecy of the VL 333 may be somewhat overstated. In 1942, Andreau applied for a design patent in France, hardly the act of someone looking to keep a secret from a government. An application was filed in the U.S. in 1945 just before V-E Day and Andreau was granted U.S. Design Patent No. D146206 in 1946. It’s not clear why a U.S. design patent was obtained for a very Francocentric project. Mathis and Andreau must have known that the VL 333 was not suitable for the U.S. market, so perhaps Mathis considered U.S. production of cars bound for sale in Europe.
After the war ended, Mathis returned to France and tried to put the VL 333 into production. It most likely would have done well in the micro-car friendly environment of postwar Europe. But in resource-poor and war-ravaged France, automobile manufacturing was dictated by the so-called “Pons Plan.” A government bureaucracy handed out permits to build cars, and dictated which market segments each company could enter. Perhaps due to his outsider status from his years in exile, Mathis did not get authorization, and the VL 333 was regulated to the footnotes of history. Mathis and other second-tier manufacturers fell by the wayside, and the 2CV became the symbol of postwar French motoring.
As Richard Lentinello wrote in a recent Hemmings Daily, one VL 333 prototype exists and is on display in the Tampa Bay Auto Museum.
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