The Dimitri Sensaud de Lavaud was a French

automobile A car or automobile is a motor vehicle with Wheel, wheels. Most definitions of ''cars'' say that they run primarily on roads, Car seat, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport private transport#Personal transport, pe ...

manufactured between 1926 and 1928. An unusual car, made in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

by M. Dimitri Sensaud de Lavaud, a Brazilian, it had an

automatic transmission An automatic transmission (sometimes abbreviated to auto or AT) is a multi-speed transmission used in internal combustion engine-based motor vehicles that does not require any input from the driver to change forward gears under normal driving c ...

. The

chassis A chassis (, ; plural ''chassis'' from French châssis ) is the load-bearing framework of an artificial object, which structurally supports the object in its construction and function. An example of a chassis is a vehicle frame, the underpart ...

was cast alloy, and it was powered by a steam-cooled 5475 cc six-cylinder

engine An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy. Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power gen ...

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

origin. Few were built. The automatic transmission did not select between several gears - instead, it relied solely on the converter's torque multiplication (like GM's much later

Dynaflow Dynaflow was the trademarked name for a type of automatic transmission developed and built by General Motors Buick Motor Division from late 1947 to mid-1963. The Dynaflow, which was introduced for the 1948 model year only as an option on Roadma ...

André Citroën André-Gustave Citroën (; 5 February 1878 – 3 July 1935) was a French industrialist and the founder of French automaker Citroën. He is remembered chiefly for the make of car named after him, but also for his application of double helical ...

had intended to use a gearbox based on Sensaud de Lavaud's principles in his 1934-launched

Citroën Traction Avant The Citroën Traction Avant () is the world’s first unibody front-wheel-drive car. A range of mostly 4-door saloons and executive cars, were made with four or six-cylinder engines, produced by the French manufacturer Citroën from 1934 to 1957. ...

7A, but it proved impossible for his engineers to make the car's 1300cc engine - coupled with Sensaud de Lavaud's invention - accelerate the vehicle and maintain acceptable speeds uphill, so the 7A appeared with a conventional 3-speed unit.

References

David Burgess Wise, ''The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Automobiles''.

Bibliography

* CERF, Alain. ''Dimitri Sensaud de Lavaud – Un ingénieur extraordinaire''. Nîmes (França): Editions du Palmier, 2009. * CERF, Alain. ''Dimitri Sensaud de Lavaud – An extraordinary engineer''. Pinellas Park, Florida (USA):

Tampa Bay Automobile Museum The Tampa Bay Automobile Museum, located in Pinellas Park, Florida in the Tampa Bay Area, displays historic automobiles from the 20th century. All of the vehicles displayed are from the collection of Alain Cerf, a French entrepreneur and the Cerf ...

, 2010. Defunct motor vehicle manufacturers of France Manufacturing companies based in Paris {{vintage-auto-stub