Near Battersea Power Station, London
Forty-five years after Citroen moved on from building them, the Type H van is still everywhere, most often seen these days as a food truck like the one above. No beauty in any classic sense, it has a story as important as its VW bus competitor or its cousin, the 2CV.
Over 350,000 of them were built between 1947 and 1951, designed originally for cheap production and post-war recovery. But it wasn’t just a cheap knockoff of other designs; it was actually a pioneer of the commercial vans and minivans we’re all familiar with. It was the first mass-produced front-wheel drive commercial vehicle; it had a unibody with no separate chassis frame, four-wheel independent suspension, and rack and pinion steering.
Because the engine is upfront in that industrial-chic corrugated nose, the truck is essentially an empty box that can be used and adapted in numerous ways. They became delivery trucks, mail trucks, ambulances, police vehicles, and from the beginning what most are now: food trucks. The corrugated body was no style decision: it enabled the body to be made of quite thin sheets of steel without losing strength.
The Type H was not Citroen’s first front-wheel drive vehicle or even truck, just the first mass-produced truck. Its prewar ancestry included both the elegant Traction Avant sedans and even a pickup truck based on the same chassis.
