The Daimler Motor Carriage of 1886 featured a vertical single-cylinder engine positioned so low in the chassis that it sat below the rear axle centerline, requiring the drive shaft to angle sharply upward to meet the gearbox—a packaging compromise that created such extreme understeer during cornering that contemporary drivers often believed the car was fundamentally unstable, when in fact the handling was simply responding rationally to weight distribution that Daimler engineers hadn’t yet learned to compensate for with suspension geometry.
Car Fact #94 — September 18, 2026
