Aurel Persu

Aurel Persu (26 December 1890 – 5 May 1977) was a Romanian engineer and pioneer car designer, the first to place the wheels inside the body of the car as part of his attempt to reach the perfect aerodynamic shape for automobiles.

[1][2] He came to the conclusion that the perfectly aerodynamic automobile must have the shape of a falling water drop,[1] taking it one step further toward that shape than the car Austrian Edmund Rumpler had presented in Berlin in 1921.

Persu, a specialist in airplanes aerodynamics and dynamics, implemented his idea in 1922–1923 in Berlin, building an automobile with an incredibly low drag coefficient of 0.28 (same as a modern Porsche Carrera) or even 0.22 (still rare among modern production cars[3]), depending on the source[citation needed].

It was the first car to have the wheels inside its aerodynamic line, which we take for granted today.

Aurel Persu donated it fully functional in 1961 to the Dimitrie Leonida Technical Museum in Bucharest[6] where it has since been on display.