CarBrandLogos archive · Panhard · 1954

PanhardDyna Z

Six seats, 850cc and barely 700 kilograms, until the steel bodies arrived.

Photo: Charles01 · CC BY-SA 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in Panhard history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Panhard Dyna Z, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

The Dyna Z took the previous car's engineering and wrapped it in something far more ambitious: a full six-seat saloon with a rounded, bulbous body, riding on the same air-cooled 851cc flat-twin driving the front wheels. Because the structure was aluminium, the whole car weighed around 700 kilograms, which is why 42 or 50 horsepower was enough to make it genuinely quick on a French main road while returning fuel consumption a much smaller car would envy.

Panhard Dyna Z · Asavaa · CC BY-SA 3.0

Design and engineering

That cleverness was expensive. Aluminium prices rose, the process was slow, and Panhard was losing money on each car, so from 1955 the bodywork was progressively converted to steel. The car gained a substantial amount of weight and lost part of its advantage, which is the moment Panhard's engineering argument began to unravel.

Panhard Dyna Z Euro Citro 2014 · Klaus Nahr · CC BY-SA 2.0

In production

Citroën took a shareholding in Panhard in the mid-1950s and assumed responsibility for distribution, which kept the company alive and put its cars into a much larger dealer network. Around 140,000 were built to 1959, easily Panhard's largest volume, before the PL 17 took over the same structure and mechanicals.