My college roommate and I looked at a used Dyna in about 1969 to replace his dying VW. We thought it was hilarious, with its bathtub shape, that goofy "dashboard" design and late-'50s plaid upholstery. The front motor mounts were attached to the exhaust pipe from each cylinder (not a bodge -- factory!). However, it drove like a dream; much quicker and quieter and smoother riding than the VW. Definitely a French car. We decided against it, partly because parts and service info was really hard to come by and we were poor college students. Fun car though!
That was my father's 2nd car (1st was a messerschmitt bubble car). He absolutely loved it but the engine used to blow an awful lot. He told me the only time it ran faultlessly was when he took it to France, where parts and mechanics were easy to find. The engine then blew within an hour of getting back to Britain.
I remember when having a FWD car meant that you had tons of leg room. Thanks to the fact that cars today all need 1,000 or more cup holders, all new cars now come with center consoles that take up 1/3 of your front legroom.
I have a letter dated November 27, 1955 from French Motors Inc. in response to my father's inquiry into having a dealership in Indianapolis for the Panhard Dyna Sports sedan. My father was intrigued with their enginenuity. He was a tool and die builder and found the French cars to be fascinating and well engineered...they did love their aluminum and plastic. The French Motors, located in Los Angeles, Calif. provided not only a brochure but a several page technical data document and another several page document on their approach to dealerships. They had two engine sizes; 850 and 745cc. Port of Entry price; East or West Coast was $2245. Dealer's price was $1795. For some reason, my father and his friend, who actually had bought one when he went out to California, decided to not pursue the dealership. They are truly fun to drive. Thanks for doing this...it brought back many good memories.
I met the woman I would later marry in 1969. She drove a Panhard. It seemed to be as peppy as my Triumph Vitesse. I really like the front doors that were hinged in back to the center column. According to her dad, an auto mechanic, the name is pronounced Pan-nard. That was the pronunciation the Dealer used when he bought the last three Panhards in the state for scrap value. He use the other two for donor vehicles to keep the one running.
Glad you talk about this kind of fancy, technical interesting french cars! For sure you got in this brand, the oldest french one, the content for a special episode: I guess you know, but please look over the production, from the "Louis XV" Dyna X to the Panhard Junior, a lovely convertible withe a sporty compressed engine! You got a lot to tell on those curiosity cars, like the external drum brakes parts of the wheel, or the only, torsion bars valves, very strange... Thanks a lot for your works, Kisses from France
Not much people know that France has the most automotive inventions and influenced the entire automotive industry. Panhard suspension, Dion axle, Sparkplugs, overhead cam, independent suspension etc. etc.
Guages like that make it easy to use same on left or right hand drive. Maybe planning for world market and saving tooling costs. Some newer ones like that now, or with the pod in the middle that can mount both ways.
Anybody notice the UK tax disc in the windscreen? What's even stranger is the tax disc was abolished in February 2014... that might be one of the last ones to be issued!
I think the French cars tended to have very cushy seats. I was a salesman at a new car dealer in 1985. One of the trades we got was a Renault Le Car, an odd little car, I was really surprised that this car still had a manual choke, it was only about 3 years old. The only impressive part of the car was that the front seats were really comfortable, like a really plush chair, not what you would expect in an econobox like this. The suspension was really soft also, I think both those things are common in French cars,
That only really happens after you turn the engine off and the fuel sits still in the pipes near hot bits. This will have just been crap in the carburettor from sitting with almost certainly ethanol-containing fuel in it.
That holds true if the carburetor has been adjusted to E-fuels. It is very true what you say that it mostly happens after the engine is shut off. Also: crap in the carburetor from stale modern gas for instance is a nightmare too, I agree. However, even with a clean and refurbished carburetor this can happen. If the float is set to factory specs then modern fuels can percolate and boil over. But a stall due to modern fuel during driving can also happen. There is a symbiotic relationship between the float valve, fuel pressure, and fuel temperature. In a classic car at idle or low revs the pressure from the mechanical fuel pump may not be enough to mitigate the fuel heating up between it and the carburetor, causing no pressure at all at the float valve (percolation; gas fumes in stead of fluid now meets the float), seizing fuel entering the bowl. This may on its turn boil the fuel in the bowl, causing a flood situation. Or the bowl may just run out (takes about 30 to 60 seconds, depending on the engine and bowl size of course). This may happen ever so slightly, even when driving in traffic or sitting at a red light causing embarrassment and angry drivers behind one. Don’t ask how I know. 😅 Starting up again is the same as after a flood when the engine was turned off as the bowl usually does boil over before it is empty (the heat rises fast when idling or driving slow, and without fresh fuel this can happen faster than you think). An electric fuel pump, even without a return line, can mitigate this, though setting the float a little bit lower would be my starting point. This at least will prevent a boil over from the bowl. It won’t prevent percolation in the line itself though. I hope I don’t come over as a wise guy, this is just personal experience from owning multiple classic cars from all era in the past and now. I am not a mechanic but have worked closely with a few classic car mechanics in the past and they taught me a lot. I am just trying to spread the knowledge and hope I didn’t butcher too much of the knowledge in the process. Cheers!
@@RustOnWheels That's an interesting report, I know a few people with 2CVs that experience this after turning off the engine but I've not heard of it happening while running. I can see how that would happen in a warmer climate, I'm in England so don't have to worry about that sort of thing much 😄
@@EdsPlasticCars I live on mainland Europe but the biggest issue is that I drive big old American cars with inefficient engines that generate a LOT of heat under the completely sealed hood/bonnet. And summers that are increasingly hot.
@@crunchyfrog555 The Figaro was a 1990s car designed to look “retro”, the Panhard was seriously futuristic. Its form followed function, as well as style. That was the only way to get a car of around 800 cc and 4.5 metres long up to 75 mph. “4 doors, 5 litres of fuel for 100 km, and 6 seats” was one slogan. Not too far off the truth, and a real feat. Paris taxi drivers loved it.
The French have a bit of a reputation for bureaucracy and red tape not to mention the language barrier so it's probably much easier to search for and buy cars here in the UK.
@@obelic71 And I see you wrote 'defiantly' which is not the same word as 'definitely' but which is often mistakenly used to mean 'definitely'. In this case, I don't think you made a mistake 😁
@@boggy7665 I am not a native english speaker but now if see the mistake and defiant. And yes the French defy status quo enginering and make their own. It can range from genious insane solution on the one side to a total insane failure.
That's odd to find a French car that's British registered (even as recently as 2015 it seems), that's now living in an American museum. I wonder what story this car has to tell?
Dude, it's a French gearbox. It will comply with gentle and discerning control. You're literally beating the shift linkage to death and forcing it to positions its not supposed to be in. You can change gear in that with the force it takes to move a single finger. No wonder you got stranded. You literally destroyed that thing with in the first minutes of the video and now it needs to be completely rebuilt.Which is a bit difficult barring access to jay Leno's fabrication capacity with 3D printing and engineering staff. As, no parts are being manufactured and the marque died like 60 years ago practically so you need to fucking reverse engineer the thing component by component. And that's not happening with the agricultural machine manufacturing level of sophistication of the US automotive industry, since the driving public seems to think cars are supposed to take the abuse of a crack addicted raging baboon behind the wheel, whose trying to score a hit. Literally. Usually only using the thing for specifically that purpose. To feed a drug addiction or dependence on worshipping a esoteric extremist christian fundamentalist literal theological equivalent to Taliban and Nazis all rollled up to one. and it's definition of what kind of imaginary friends should live between their ears. Or, for example who can you enslave and destroy by genocide because this group of spanish inquistion fanatics happened to say so, and got it while hallucinating their misanthropy as being a "message from god". Basing all this shit on a medival editorial work, of the damn British nobility, to take control of the Church and it's money, so the king can have another divorce. And all the tithe for himself. :D Yup. Definitively divinely inspired words which a church that is operating in a country based on, defining this self-authored and assumed "godly authority" and the taxation rights that come with it, according to the king that is, as illegal that people should be reading as the "literal word of god" to circumvent their constitution and it's separation of the state from the church precily becuse. Yeah, pleas acquire at least a thimble of comptence in european sophistry before you fuck up a historical artifact. Also, Learn to drive.
Gearshift is no real problem once you get used to it. I drove my 1959 Dyna Z16, which was made with a steel body by then, all over the UK and Europe in the eighties, with no problems, although vapour lock could occur if stuck in traffic on a really hot day. The fuel pumps normally had a lever so you could pump fuel through to get going again within two minutes.
My college roommate and I looked at a used Dyna in about 1969 to replace his dying VW. We thought it was hilarious, with its bathtub shape, that goofy "dashboard" design and late-'50s plaid upholstery. The front motor mounts were attached to the exhaust pipe from each cylinder (not a bodge -- factory!). However, it drove like a dream; much quicker and quieter and smoother riding than the VW. Definitely a French car. We decided against it, partly because parts and service info was really hard to come by and we were poor college students. Fun car though!
If you can't change gear in your Panhard, you have to Panharder.
You should put the name of the car, the *Panhard Dyna Z,* somewhere in the title or description.
I love the design ideas in this Panhard.
Love quirky French cars so this is right up my alley lol.
That was my father's 2nd car (1st was a messerschmitt bubble car). He absolutely loved it but the engine used to blow an awful lot. He told me the only time it ran faultlessly was when he took it to France, where parts and mechanics were easy to find. The engine then blew within an hour of getting back to Britain.
Even cars are succeptible to the French-British rivalry
Pan-Ardd.
The H is silent.
Because French.
Big Saab 92 (not 9-2x) vibes with this thing, especially in the roof line and front nose with those small round headlights
Ruh-roh. Gotta change the show to “Jason Tows.”
My favorite part is the break down. Our guy out there with this excellent self-asides.
French, left-hand drive, located in the USA, but with a U.K registration plate? (And a UK tax disc, which expired at the end of March 2015!)
@@naths.garage - * vehicle tax, not road tax 😉
If it was built in France, they'll have used Aluminium instead of Aluminum for the body.
lmao
I remember when having a FWD car meant that you had tons of leg room. Thanks to the fact that cars today all need 1,000 or more cup holders, all new cars now come with center consoles that take up 1/3 of your front legroom.
Love these vids but they need to be longer.
@ 1:34. That door handle is just like the one on a Tesla Model 3
What a great marvel jewel...ughhh! I´d drive this around, not just to the office but on sunday´s trips to the beach, Great show----
i always LOVE it when you go the the LANE. thanks for jumping on that grenade for those of us who cant get over there often.
What a cool little machine. If yall want a video of a functional panhard check out jay leno's garage.
really neat car for its time, absolutely overshadowed by the citroen ds
I have a letter dated November 27, 1955 from French Motors Inc. in response to my father's inquiry into having a dealership in Indianapolis for the Panhard Dyna Sports sedan. My father was intrigued with their enginenuity. He was a tool and die builder and found the French cars to be fascinating and well engineered...they did love their aluminum and plastic. The French Motors, located in Los Angeles, Calif. provided not only a brochure but a several page technical data document and another several page document on their approach to dealerships. They had two engine sizes; 850 and 745cc. Port of Entry price; East or West Coast was $2245. Dealer's price was $1795. For some reason, my father and his friend, who actually had bought one when he went out to California, decided to not pursue the dealership. They are truly fun to drive. Thanks for doing this...it brought back many good memories.
Ah, you didn't have a shot with all panels open! :(
and also the little old french boy have a hemi head with torsion bar valves and goes pretty high in the rev range
I met the woman I would later marry in 1969. She drove a Panhard. It seemed to be as peppy as my Triumph Vitesse. I really like the front doors that were hinged in back to the center column. According to her dad, an auto mechanic, the name is pronounced Pan-nard. That was the pronunciation the Dealer used when he bought the last three Panhards in the state for scrap value. He use the other two for donor vehicles to keep the one running.
Glad you talk about this kind of fancy, technical interesting french cars!
For sure you got in this brand, the oldest french one, the content for a special episode: I guess you know, but please look over the production, from the "Louis XV" Dyna X to the Panhard Junior, a lovely convertible withe a sporty compressed engine!
You got a lot to tell on those curiosity cars, like the external drum brakes parts of the wheel, or the only, torsion bars valves, very strange...
Thanks a lot for your works, Kisses from France
Not much people know that France has the most automotive inventions and influenced the entire automotive industry.
Panhard suspension, Dion axle, Sparkplugs, overhead cam, independent suspension etc. etc.
Would be so awesome if you would go into more detail on how to drive it exactly. 👍
Guages like that make it easy to use same on left or right hand drive. Maybe planning for world market and saving tooling costs. Some newer ones like that now, or with the pod in the middle that can mount both ways.
Anybody notice the UK tax disc in the windscreen? What's even stranger is the tax disc was abolished in February 2014... that might be one of the last ones to be issued!
I think the French cars tended to have very cushy seats. I was a salesman at a new car dealer in 1985. One of the trades we got was a Renault Le Car, an odd little car, I was really surprised that this car still had a manual choke, it was only about 3 years old. The only impressive part of the car was that the front seats were really comfortable, like a really plush chair, not what you would expect in an econobox like this. The suspension was really soft also, I think both those things are common in French cars,
2 things this and Aston Martin DB11 have in common: door handle operation, clam shell hood.
My guess is vapor lock which was a bit of a problem in air cooled engines that tend to run fairly hot. I wonder if it started after it cooled down.
Especially with modern fuels… it’s horror. E-fuels boil really really fast.
That only really happens after you turn the engine off and the fuel sits still in the pipes near hot bits. This will have just been crap in the carburettor from sitting with almost certainly ethanol-containing fuel in it.
That holds true if the carburetor has been adjusted to E-fuels.
It is very true what you say that it mostly happens after the engine is shut off. Also: crap in the carburetor from stale modern gas for instance is a nightmare too, I agree.
However, even with a clean and refurbished carburetor this can happen. If the float is set to factory specs then modern fuels can percolate and boil over. But a stall due to modern fuel during driving can also happen.
There is a symbiotic relationship between the float valve, fuel pressure, and fuel temperature. In a classic car at idle or low revs the pressure from the mechanical fuel pump may not be enough to mitigate the fuel heating up between it and the carburetor, causing no pressure at all at the float valve (percolation; gas fumes in stead of fluid now meets the float), seizing fuel entering the bowl. This may on its turn boil the fuel in the bowl, causing a flood situation. Or the bowl may just run out (takes about 30 to 60 seconds, depending on the engine and bowl size of course).
This may happen ever so slightly, even when driving in traffic or sitting at a red light causing embarrassment and angry drivers behind one. Don’t ask how I know. 😅
Starting up again is the same as after a flood when the engine was turned off as the bowl usually does boil over before it is empty (the heat rises fast when idling or driving slow, and without fresh fuel this can happen faster than you think).
An electric fuel pump, even without a return line, can mitigate this, though setting the float a little bit lower would be my starting point. This at least will prevent a boil over from the bowl. It won’t prevent percolation in the line itself though.
I hope I don’t come over as a wise guy, this is just personal experience from owning multiple classic cars from all era in the past and now. I am not a mechanic but have worked closely with a few classic car mechanics in the past and they taught me a lot. I am just trying to spread the knowledge and hope I didn’t butcher too much of the knowledge in the process.
Cheers!
@@RustOnWheels That's an interesting report, I know a few people with 2CVs that experience this after turning off the engine but I've not heard of it happening while running. I can see how that would happen in a warmer climate, I'm in England so don't have to worry about that sort of thing much 😄
@@EdsPlasticCars I live on mainland Europe but the biggest issue is that I drive big old American cars with inefficient engines that generate a LOT of heat under the completely sealed hood/bonnet. And summers that are increasingly hot.
You need to revisit this car after a tune up.
And people think the Yugo's shifter is loose
I like it, as it kind of looks like that Nissan Figaro.
It’s rather exactly the other way around.
@@thomasalbrecht5914 To be fair though, they both look the wrong way round and the right way round at the same time.
@@crunchyfrog555 The Figaro was a 1990s car designed to look “retro”, the Panhard was seriously futuristic. Its form followed function, as well as style. That was the only way to get a car of around 800 cc and 4.5 metres long up to 75 mph. “4 doors, 5 litres of fuel for 100 km, and 6 seats” was one slogan. Not too far off the truth, and a real feat. Paris taxi drivers loved it.
@@thomasalbrecht5914 and yes, i know that. that was nothing to do with the point
Friggeen deecent bud
nice
Does this museum source all its french cars via UK?!
The French have a bit of a reputation for bureaucracy and red tape not to mention the language barrier so it's probably much easier to search for and buy cars here in the UK.
I remember seeing a French car with a Dutch license plate in Jason Drives at LANE too.
Get Jay Leno on the phone. He'll get her right. She's a sweetheart, in her perfectly imperfect way.
Funny how you have to go to the UK to get obscure old french cars
The dash and the taillights and the bathtub shape sort-of follow the '49-50 Nash. Or is it the other way 'round?
Its a French car so its defiantly the other way around.
@@obelic71 And I see you wrote 'defiantly' which is not the same word as 'definitely' but which is often mistakenly used to mean 'definitely'. In this case, I don't think you made a mistake 😁
@@boggy7665 I am not a native english speaker but now if see the mistake and defiant.
And yes the French defy status quo enginering and make their own.
It can range from genious insane solution on the one side to a total insane failure.
How did they fit the airbag in that steering column?
That's odd to find a French car that's British registered (even as recently as 2015 it seems), that's now living in an American museum. I wonder what story this car has to tell?
That steering column to the face wouldn't be so comfortable in an accident.
What you need, is a Chang Lee.
LOL !!! Uh... you didn't check the fuel BEFORE you departed and... ran out of gas. LOL
Car from England... It's a Dyna Zed!
that is what you call, a "funky" car!
Yeah im not surprised from a museum car that prob hasn't driven in 20 years and most likely isn't tuned right at all
Can we get English as a 2nd language?
Absolutely in love.
Pan harrrrd kkkkkkkkkk
You have a French car , with a UK reg & tax disc and your running it in the US . When you get stopped by the Police , who good is your German.?
Dude, it's a French gearbox. It will comply with gentle and discerning control. You're literally beating the shift linkage to death and forcing it to positions its not supposed to be in. You can change gear in that with the force it takes to move a single finger.
No wonder you got stranded. You literally destroyed that thing with in the first minutes of the video and now it needs to be completely rebuilt.Which is a bit difficult barring access to jay Leno's fabrication capacity with 3D printing and engineering staff. As, no parts are being manufactured and the marque died like 60 years ago practically so you need to fucking reverse engineer the thing component by component. And that's not happening with the agricultural machine manufacturing level of sophistication of the US automotive industry, since the driving public seems to think cars are supposed to take the abuse of a crack addicted raging baboon behind the wheel, whose trying to score a hit. Literally. Usually only using the thing for specifically that purpose. To feed a drug addiction or dependence on worshipping a esoteric extremist christian fundamentalist literal theological equivalent to Taliban and Nazis all rollled up to one. and it's definition of what kind of imaginary friends should live between their ears. Or, for example who can you enslave and destroy by genocide because this group of spanish inquistion fanatics happened to say so, and got it while hallucinating their misanthropy as being a "message from god".
Basing all this shit on a medival editorial work, of the damn British nobility, to take control of the Church and it's money, so the king can have another divorce. And all the tithe for himself. :D
Yup. Definitively divinely inspired words which a church that is operating in a country based on, defining this self-authored and assumed "godly authority" and the taxation rights that come with it, according to the king that is, as illegal that people should be reading as the "literal word of god" to circumvent their constitution and it's separation of the state from the church precily becuse.
Yeah, pleas acquire at least a thimble of comptence in european sophistry before you fuck up a historical artifact. Also, Learn to drive.
Wow. That went in a strange direction quickly. I agree with the French gearbox advice. But the rest...chill, deep breaths, and take your medicine.
@@noscwoh1 yeah they should probably take their anti physcotics now
Gearshift is no real problem once you get used to it. I drove my 1959 Dyna Z16, which was made with a steel body by then, all over the UK and Europe in the eighties, with no problems, although vapour lock could occur if stuck in traffic on a really hot day. The fuel pumps normally had a lever so you could pump fuel through to get going again within two minutes.