TWIL #145 - A basket of eggs
Every week, I share something I learned in the previous seven days. I usually find these while I'm putting my weekly newsletter together but somehow, they don't quite fit!
This week I learned that the Citroën 2CV was designed to carry a basket of eggs across a freshly ploughed field without breaking one.
I drove a red 2CV for a while back in the 90's - it was a very smooth (and slow car).
The eggs were the brief, more or less. In the mid 1930s Pierre-Jules Boulanger asked his engineers for a car that could replace the horse and cart for French farmers. Four seats, 50kg of produce, cheap to run, and enough headroom to drive in a hat. The eggs were the suspension test.
Two things struck me. The first is how much good design you get from one concrete requirement. Nobody said "make it comfortable". They said eggs, field, don't break them, and the whole car followed from that.
The second is the timing. By 1939 about 250 cars were built and ready for the Paris Motor Show. Then the war came, the prototypes were hidden or destroyed, and the 2CV finally launched in October 1948. The press called it a sardine tin. The waiting list hit six years. They built more than five million.
The Transatlantic Journal has the whole story, including the yellow one from For Your Eyes Only and the new electric version Citroën showed last month. It has a door compartment that holds six eggs.
What is the one requirement that would change everything you are building?
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