The Voiturette was powerful for its size and weight, and its low build made it stable, but the short wheelbase made spinning on slippery cobbled roads quite common, and comfort was not a priority because they had no suspension, relying on pneumatic tyres and a C-sprung seat to provide a modicum of relief. However, driven by what we must assume were men made of granite, they dominated their class in early motor races, famously occupying the top four places in the 1896 Paris-Mantes-Paris race, and winning their class in the 1897 Paris-Dieppe race with a time that was 0.6mph faster than the best four-wheeled car. Legendary English racing driver and Le Mans winner S.C.H. Sammy Davis bought an example in 1929 to use in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run (a Léon Bollée Voiturette was apparently the first car across the line on the original Emancipation Run in 1896) and was pleased to achieve a maximum speed of 19mph when testing it at Brooklands! This would have been impressive in 1896; the first Land Speed Record was recorded in 1898 at 39mph. Amazing to think now how far we have come.
After being developed in the family’s Le Mans workshop, the car was produced in Paris, at 163 Avenue Victor Hugo, and at Le Harve by Diligent et Cie. It’s believed that around 750 units were made; Michelin ordered 200 and the Hon Charles Rolls (we all know who he was) was a customer in 1897. By 1899 new four-wheeled Bollées were being produced, some with much larger 4.6-litre engines, but the marque was bought by UK maker Morris in 1924, who produced the Morris-Léon Bollée until 1931. It finally faded away for good in 1933.
What’s in a name?
Léon Bollée’s tricycle may have been short-lived, but the word he appears to have invented to name it, Voiturette, lived on and became the generally accepted term for a small lightweight car. It comes from the French word for automobile, voiture, and became so ubiquitous that it was used to name a specific Voiturette racing class for lightweight cars with engines of 1.5 litres or smaller. The supercharged Alfa Romeo 158/159 Alfetta that so dominated F1 on its inception was, in fact, originally designed as a Voiturette class racer.
Or, ignore and watch them flee …
The police force had started policing roads prior to the advancement of the car, and complaints had been made about congestion in cities, especially London, in the first half of the nineteenth century, almost 100 years before cars caught on. Horses had a will of their own and were not always as well trained as they should have been … Indeed, the Great Exhibition of 1851 had taken traffic congestion at Hyde Park Corner as a theme, with various solutions being hypothesised. The passing of the Metropolitan Public Carriage Act 1869 vested many responsibilities into the hands of the police with regard to both Hackney and Public Carriages. By 1895, horseless carriages were appearing and major cities were getting motorised omnibuses or trams.
However, it’s easy to forget that in the 1890s it was by no means clear what cars were going to be. They were obviously going to be something, and that something was going to be important, but what that was, no one was quite sure. Some saw them as a miracle cure for congestion (they took up less space than a horse-drawn wagon) and some saw them as evil machines likely to kill everyone who came into contact with them. Most people, of course, held opinions that were between these two extremes. Petrol eventually came to the fore as the way forward for powering cars, but prior to that, steam, electric (which it now seems was 120 years or so ahead of its time, because battery technology and electronic control have only recently made this viable and it is now very obviously the future) and even coal dust and various other strange ideas were explored.
However, by 1901 the Maybach/Daimler-designed Mercedes had built upon the 1891 ‘Système Panhard’ (a mechanical layout which set the front-engine transmission then rear-wheel-drive layout on most cars until the 1960s) and basically set the template for the twentieth-century car: a petrol engine, a gearbox, and brakes on a separate pedal. Everything else that appeared – from disc brakes to fuel injection and rain-sensing wipers – is a refinement of that original concept.
So the government had to act, and in 1903 came the Motor Car Act, which was the first parliamentary legislation pertaining specifically to the internal combustion engine. The original intention appears to have been to abolish speed restrictions on open roads, but ultimately that did not happen and a blanket 20mph limit was imposed instead, which lasted, officially at least, until 1 January 1931. The fact that it displaced legislation known as the Locomotives on Highways Act tells us much about the rapid rate of technological change and the British government’s typically measured approach to this. Only in the last ten years have the basic principles laid down by this been seriously challenged by technology, and as self-driving cars become a reality the legislators will have an ever-greater role in managing traffic and perhaps they will even control traffic flow through a central computer system.
In the same year, 1903, a Royal Commission on London’s traffic was set up, and after three years of investigation, having heard evidence from all interested parties, it made the following recommendations to the Home Secretary:
• Improved regulations for traffic.
• Street improvements.
• The regulation of street works.
• The regulation of costermongers.
• The removal of obstructions to traffic.
It also recommended that an advisory Traffic Board be set up for the Greater London area. In making this recommendation, the committee stated that it was of the opinion that the creation of such a board would enable traffic matters to be considered as a whole, and not in the parochial manner of existing local authorities. Apart from the phrase ‘costermongers’, whose meaning I confess I had to double-check (it’s a street trader, and I for one think we should try to bring it back into regular use! It’s so much more elegant than ‘street-trader’ or ‘pop-up shop’), that set of recommendations could have been written last week … It was a serious business, though, as London had reported around 10,000 traffic accidents a year alone in the preceding few years, and some other large cities had little better statistics.
However, as cars became more numerous on the roads, so motorists devised ways of warning each other of speed traps, which, in the early 1900s before World War I, were numerous. As early as 1901 the importers of Panhard et Levassor cars operated an official service for their customers to notify them of the location of speed traps. That’s