Thursday Trivia

Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars! This Week’s Question: What was the first production car to feature the MacPherson Strut suspension? If you think you know the answer, strut on over the jump and see if you’re right. The earliest form of automotive suspension was actually carried over from the horse and buggy days – that being elliptical, or semi-elliptical steel springs. Eventually friction shock absorbers were added to control jounce, and for the longest time, that was the standard method of isolating the parts that you didn’t want to bounce from the parts that inevitably would. Some of our most beloved cars featured these ‘leaf’ spring suspensions, including the 289 Cobra and even the Chevy Corvette, although that car currently uses composite instead of steel for its springing medium. Other designs have been engineered over the years, some with great success, and others with less. Perhaps one of the most ubiquitous of suspension designs today is that which was envisioned by a Ford engineer named Earle MacPherson back in the 1940s. Unlike earlier suspensions that separated the shock absorber from the supporting structure, MacPherson’s design merged the two, making the shock absorber also the vertical locator, and wrapping it in a coil spring. It was a compact and elegant design. It was also not perhaps the first of its kind – MacPherson may have taken inspiration from the 1927 French Cottin-Desgouttes “Sans Secousse” design – but it eventually became of the most common of front suspension designs in the world. And it all started with one French Ford, introduced in 1948. From Wikipedia:

(The Ford Vedette was) Introduced at the 1948 Mondial de l’Automobile in Paris, it was designed entirely in Detroit (resembling contemporary Mercury models) and featured the Poissy-made 2158 cc Aquillon side valve V8 engine of Ford’s Flathead engine family, the same as in pre-war Matford cars. It was the only French car of its time with a V8 engine. Importantly, the Vedette was the first car to feature the new independent front suspension concept developed by Earle S. MacPherson, known today as MacPherson struts.

Today the MacPherson Strut suspension is fairly ubiquitous in small to mid-sized cars of reasonable price, and not just on Fords, all around the globe. Image: Wikipedia