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Burney Streamline - Not only Maybach built a Zeppelin

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Created on January 5, 2022

Text:

Paul Krüger

Photos:

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - The car for the Prince of Wales

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - British streamline car with rear engine

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - Distinctive teardrop shape

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - Free-standing wheels with 50 degree steering angle

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - With water-cooled eight-cylinder engine in the rear

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - Spare wheel in the rear door

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - eight-cylinder from Beverley-Barnes in the rear

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - Self-supporting body with airplane-like steel skeleton

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Burney Streamline (1928) - prototype on Alvis chassis with round nose

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - In London city traffic next to an Austin Seven

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1931) - Illustration from the brochure for the front with hood and flat windshield

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1931) - Illustration from the brochure for the sloping front with swept windshield

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - Phantom drawing side view

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Burney Streamline 22/80 hp (1930) - drawing rear view

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Crossley Streamline (1933) - At the Olympia Motor Show in London

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Crossley Streamline (1933) - sectional drawing

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Crossley Streamline (1933) - Illustration of the front suspension

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Crossley Streamline (1933) - One of two surviving examples

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Crossley Streamline (1933) - With free-standing headlights

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Crossley Streamline (1933) - If the car only had one spare wheel, there was a bar in the other door

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Rumpler Tropfenwagen (1921) - One of the first streamlined cars

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Summary

From time to time, not only the wheel has to be reinvented, but also the entire automobile. So in the early 1930s, the English airship designer Dennistoun Burney set about building the first completely newly developed car since the invention of the motor car - with a self-supporting streamlined body, rear engine and space for seven passengers. But the big breakthrough did not come. Only twelve examples of the Burney Streamline were built by 1933. This article tells the story of the first English streamlined car and shows it in historical photographs.

This article contains the following chapters

Aerodynamics in mind
Series production of the Streamline
Safety and economy
Enthusiastic testers
The three six-cylinder
Streamline Evo II
Half the price, twice the success

Estimated reading time: 8min

Preview (beginning of the article)

A number of self-proclaimed automotive visionaries have had to learn the hard way that "different" does not necessarily mean "better". The most famous of these was probably Preston Tucker, whose spectacular crash landing in 1948 was later even made into a movie. Eighteen years earlier, the Englishman Charles Dennistoun Burney had already pursued a far more consistent approach of building the fastest, most economical, most practical, most comfortable, most stable and safest - in short, the best - automobile for the masses. Burney had made his fortune during the First World War by developing the "Otter" - a device for clearing anchor mines from the sea - and selling it to the Vickers armaments company, which commissioned him to build a civilian airship after the war. The result was called the R-100, was 210 meters long, had almost 4000 hp and a speed of around 130 km/h.

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