Peugeot Q3A

In my last post, we had seen that a bomb was planted in the house of Professor Topolino in Nyon. After the explosion, obviously the Fire Brigade rushed to the site. They were seen using two vehicles, a Willys Jeep Station Wagon followed by a fire engine. This fire engine was a Peugeot Q3A.

The Q3A was the successor of the Peugeot DMA, which was manufactured by the French company between 1941 and 1948 and was designed as per the requirements of the occupying German Army.The DMA was the first forward control cab design from Peugeot. The Q3A was very similar to the DMA and was manufactured between 1948 and 1950. It incorporated a number of improvements to the chassis and rear suspension. Its load carrying capacity was reduced to 1,400 kg.

The truck was very basic in nature, the cabin had no heating, trims for the door and dashboard and not sound proofing. It was available in only one colour which was the green colour used by the Wehrmacht. The reason was that, Peugeot was building the DMA for the Wehrmacht and had lot of left over paint. In the badly destroyed economies of the late 40s, Peugeot was directed to use whatever left over paint it had in store.

15,039 Q3As were manufactured by Peugeot over the two years when it was in production. The main competitors of the vehicle were Citroen U23 and U11, and the Renault Galion, Schooner and Outfielder. These competitors were no match for the Q3A till Citroen launched the TUB. This was a front wheel drive vehicle and provided a flat loading bay, thus changing the whole game.

This truck used the engine fro m the Peugeot 203. It was a 4-cylinder inline naturally aspirated petrol engine. The engine on the Q3A was de-tuned to produce 40 BHP power as against the 45 produced by it in 203. This was done to minimise damage to the engine in case of overloading of the truck as was expected. The truck had good pulling power as the engine produced 80 N-m of torque.