Aurel Persu (1890–1977) was a Romanian engineer, and the first to apply aerodynamics principles to automobiles. He came to the conclusion that the perfectly aerodynamic automobile has the shape of a falling water-drop.
Persu implemented his idea in 1922–1923 in Berlin, building an automobile that could reach very high speeds for that time, and it could take curves at up to 60 km/h. It was the first car to have the wheels inside its aerodynamic line, which we take for granted today. Persu’s design received German patent number 402683 in 1924 and US patent 1648505 in 1927.
The original car ran for 120,000 km and since 1961 has been on display in the Dimitrie Leonida Technical Museum in Bucharest. The car has wrong wheels, and is in rather poor shape.
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