Monday, April 8, 2013

1921 Rumpler Tropfenwagen

The Rumpler Tropfenwagen was a odd yet advanced car developed by Austrian engineer Edmund Rumpler. Rumpler had worked primarily as a designer of airplanes, when in 1921 he introduced his Tropfenwagen at the Berlin Auto Show. That car is historically credited as being the first truly and purposely designed streamline car (predating the Chrysler Airflow and Tatra T107 from Czechoslovakia). Oddly enough, the car was designed to cut wind resistance vertically, not horizontally.



This mid-engined mechanical marvel, the product of Rumpler’s wartime aviation experience, featured a W6 engine with three banks of paired cylinders, all working on a common crankshaft. Winglets, a teardrop-shaped cabin and body, and that cycloptic center headlight, somehow conspired to produce a super-slippery drag coefficient of .28 - a reading that is quite low even by today’s standards. As many as 80 Rumplers were made, including two that were featured and then set aflame in the German silent science fiction film “Metropolis” (1927). Today, only two Rumpler Tropfenwagen examples are known to exist.
Source: Internet