The Americans thought they had invented it, but the truth is quite different. Here is the invention born from a large European country that a US company hoped to “deal as its own” in the face of history.
Sometimes, the real inventor of a revolutionary technology remains in the shadows while someone else takes credit for its creation. It happened with many famous inventors including one who literally sensed the potential of a technology destined to change the world of cars. Here’s the story they never told you.
The first of all
If you were asked which was the first car in history to show off an aerodynamic line, what would you answer? As good connoisseurs of the modern history of the motor world, certainly the famous one Chrysler Airflow from 1934 which was certainly the very first car to experiment with this type. But what would you think if we told you that in fact, has there ever been a man who built something like this better and much earlier?
Yes, because the real invention – or rather discovery – of the benefits of aerodynamic method comes from Romania, a European country that is now much better known for its low-cost cars such as those produced by the Dacia brand acquired by Renault and currently a record-breaking brand for sales in the first month of 2023 with over 20,000 Dacia Sanderos placed in about thirty of days across the continent.
Brilliant intuition
The principle of aerodynamics according to which a car that offers less air resistance consumes much less fuel than one that pays absolutely no attention to this small detail was first guessed by an inventor named Aurel Persu. The man was born in Romania in 1890 and during the 1920s he tried in every way to make car manufacturers understand this important revolution.
In 1922 our Persu was in Berlin, the pulsating center of German heavy industry where the very first engines for automobiles and motorcycles were born. Using only his personal funds the inventor produced a car named after his surname, the Aurel Persu Car which was to demonstrate the goodness of his ideas. The principle was that of the drop of water which, falling to the ground, offers very little resistance to the air, hence the singular shape of the medium.
No warranty, no product
The car in the shape of a drop of water by Persu has an impressive line for the period if you consider that the cars in those days were still very similar to ungainly carriages with spoked wheels and open frames: just think what a genius Persu was, the man had also understood that keeping the car tires inside the bodywork instead of making them protrude, it greatly improved the aerodynamics of the vehicle.
These intuitions seem trivial today but at the time, Persu fu the only one to put them into practice creating a car with an estimated drag coefficient between 0.28 and 0.22 which can be compared to that of certain modern supercars such as the Pagani Zonda which stops at 0.37! Although he was well ahead of his time, however, the Romanian inventor never made his invention on an industrial scale.
According to the chronicles of the time, in fact, some European industries they stepped forward to buy Aurel Persu’s patent but they did not offer great guarantees to the inventor who, rather than sell his idea for little money without any personal gain or recognition, turned around and returned to Romania where he would die in 1977 after seeing his principles become the norm in the automotive world. A full thirteen years later, Chrysler would produce the Airflow.