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The Citroën TUB (from the French Traction Utilitaire Basse or Traction Utilitaire type B) was a light van derived from the Traction Avant passenger car.[1] The van was produced by Citroën between 1939 and 1941. In May 1941 an upgraded version, the Citroën TUC replaced the TUB, but by the end of that year the last of these vans had probably been produced.
The Citroën product development department had the first prototype running by the Autumn of 1937, and on 12 May 1939 the van was homologated for sale in the French market. Although low floored vans with the driver set well forwards and sliding side-door on the pavement side would have become relatively mainstream twenty years later, in the 1930s the radical new van was quite unlike anything else available.
The van took its 4-cylinder 35 hp (26 kW) engine, initially of 1628 cc, from the company's Traction 7C. In the car the engine sat comfortably just behind the front wheels, but in the van most of the engine's weight, along with the driver's feet, was ahead of the front wheels. The driver's cab was raised sufficiently to allow most of the mechanical elements to be installed beneath it, although the engine itself intruded from the front into the central portion of the cab. The floor of the load area was just 42 cm (16 inches) above ground level, and it was possible for anyone less than 175 cm tall to stand in it without needing to stoop. Access from the driver's seat to the load area behind was excellent, especially since on the right side of the driver's cab there was normally no second seat fitted. The side door on the pavement side was a sliding door, and in this respect another radical innovation in contemporary terms. The sliding door on the right of the load area was fashioned from light-weight low cost materials. On each side of the load area, the upper side portions of the van's sides consisted tarpaulin-material curtains, incorporating little windows of flexible plastic. Again, the emphasis was on avoiding complexity, saving weight and minimising cost. On the left-side, there being here no side door, the curtain ran the full length of the load area and could be rolled up and fixed to the roof edge, revealing a load space in excess of 6 cubic meters. The overall result was a structure which combined extreme practicality with extreme simplicity. The spare wheel and battery were stored in a locker on the left side of the van, accessible from the outside but completely sealed off from the load area. Production of the van's bodywork was entrusted to a coach building firm called Fernand Genève.
The engine was the 1,628 cc four-cylinder water-cooled unit which by now powered the 7C version of the manufacturer's Traction passenger car, which also provided the van's three-speed manual transmission and front torsion-bar suspension and (still innovative) front-wheel drive drive-train. The van's rear suspension came from a very simple leaf-spring arrangement. The 1,020 kg (2,249 lb) carrying capacity was a little greater than had initially been envisaged by Boulanger, which presumably led to a firming of the rear suspension settings. The light weight of the van's body, the lack of weight balance resulting from positioning the engine and driver at the extreme front of the vehicle and the very rudimentary nature of the rear suspension meant that drivers quickly learned that without the weight of a load in the van, it was excessively prone to tail slide. The hydraulic braking system also came from the Traction, though the drum brakes were the slightly larger ones from the 1911 cc Traction 11 version.
The 1628 cc TUB went on sale on 5 June 1939, less than four weeks after its homologation. It was priced at 36,000 francs at a time when the base versions of the passenger cars from which it was derived were priced slightly above 26,000 francs.
The TUB is the first commercial vehicle ever equipped with a lateral sliding door.[1]
max power
43 hp
acceleration 0-100 km/h
--
top speed
70 km/h
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_TUB
http://www.autoviva.com/tub_11/version/5188
