Peugeot Type 3

Peugeot Type 3 at a glance

Armand Peugeot's turn to petrol

Armand Peugeot's first self-propelled vehicles, from 1889, were steam-powered tricycles. In 1890 he met Gottlieb Daimler and Émile Levassor and concluded that a practical car needed four wheels and a petrol engine. The Type 2 was the first such Peugeot, and the Type 3 followed in 1891.

The engine came by a roundabout route. Daimler had licensed his designs for France to Panhard et Levassor, and English Wikipedia's Panhard article records that in 1891 the company shared the licence with Armand Peugeot. French Wikipedia adds that the Type 3 was based on the Daimler Stahlradwagen of 1889 and used the Daimler Type P engine, the same unit as the Type 2. The Type 3 was 20 cm longer than the Type 2 and kept its width. The family business and its later cars are covered in our history of Peugeot.

Engine and design

The engine was a 565 cc V-twin with its cylinders set at 15°, mounted at the rear. It produced 1.5 kW (2 hp) at 1,000 rpm, enough for a top speed of about 18 km/h. Chains drove the rear wheels. The open vis-à-vis body seated four people, two of them facing the other two, on a wheelbase of 1,630 mm.

The sources give no weight, so no power-to-weight figure is quoted here. English Wikipedia rates the engine in hp and German Wikipedia in PS; for such small outputs the two are almost the same, as our power converter shows.

Paris–Brest–Paris 1891

In September 1891 Peugeot sent a Type 3 to accompany the cyclists in the first Paris–Brest–Paris race. Pierre Giffard of Le Petit Journal organised the event over about 1,200 km; 207 riders started, 99 finished, and Charles Terront won in 71 hours 22 minutes. English Wikipedia reports that the car covered 2,045 km at an average of 14.7 km/h without major faults; French Wikipedia gives 14 km/h and counts the trip from Valentigney and back. A photograph caption in French Wikipedia names the engineer Louis Rigoulot and the foreman Auguste Doriot as the crew. The demonstration car became the first Peugeot sold to the public.

The article on the race adds the human side. Armand Peugeot wanted the car's progress certified by Giffard's network of marshals. The car drove from Valentigney to Paris and then set off behind the cyclists, covering 200 km on the first day and 160 km on the second. A gear failure near Morlaix cost about 24 hours; the crew repaired it with a shoemaker's tools and reached Brest after dark, where a crowd and the local Peugeot dealer met them. By then the leading cyclists were already back in Paris, and the Peugeot finished six days after them.

Peugeot in the first motor races

The early races were reliability trials as much as contests of speed, and Peugeot cars did well in them:

English Wikipedia's Type 3 article identifies the 1895 runner-up as a lightened Type 3, which averaged 21.7 km/h, against 14.7 km/h on the 1891 run. Émile Levassor finished first in 48 hours 48 minutes, but his car, like Rigoulot's, was a two-seater, and the rules had been written for four-seaters, so Koechlin's Peugeot received the main prize. At Paris–Rouen, Lemaître's Peugeot, rated at about 2.2 kW (3 hp), finished 3 minutes 30 seconds behind Count de Dion's steam vehicle. The steamer was not eligible for the main prize because it needed a stoker. The sources do not say which Peugeot types took part in 1894.

Peugeot Type 3 compared with other early cars

The Type 3 shared its engine size with the Daimler Stahlradwagen that inspired it and was slower than the cars of the late 1890s. The figures come from each car's Wikipedia articles:

Compared with the Stahlradwagen, the Peugeot had about 0.5 kW more from the same 565 cc. Within ten years the De Dion-Bouton Vis-à-vis and the Fiat 4 HP roughly doubled the Type 3's top speed.

Italy: Saronno and the first registered car

The Type 3 had an Italian career as well. From 1891 Costruzioni Meccaniche di Saronno, near Milan, assembled Type 3 cars under a Peugeot licence; French Wikipedia calls it the first car produced entirely in Italy. Gaetano Rossi, director of the Lanerossi company in Piovene Rocchette near Vicenza, ordered a Type 3 that French Wikipedia describes as the first car registered in Italy. It was car number 25, with Daimler engine number 124. A surviving Type 3 is kept at the Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile in Turin.

Legacy

The Type 3 is the car with which Peugeot moved from experiments to selling cars. It was the only model in the Peugeot catalogue in 1892 and 1893, and the Type 4 followed it. Its engine connects three of the earliest car makers: the design was Daimler's, the licence came through Panhard et Levassor, and the car was Peugeot's.

• To see one: the Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile in Turin keeps a surviving car, and a Type 3 has been shown at Sochaux, home of the L'Aventure Peugeot museum (see the photo below).
• To understand the design: compare it with the Daimler Stahlradwagen, the 1889 car it was based on.
• For the numbers: 64 cars in four years, built by hand at Valentigney.

Current and past models are listed in the Peugeot catalogue, and more early cars are in our classic cars section.