Talk:Peugeot Type 3

Explaining my recent changes in the "World Record" section:

This section seems to have started with some confusion and then acquired more over time. Unfortunately, my first attempt to fix things actually restored the original confusion before I finally realized what had really happened and corrected the error.

Before I started, the article claimed the car had "operated for 1471 kilometers (914.03 miles) without major malfunctions". The 1471 km figure had resulted from this 10 May 2016 edit by Tvx, who reasonably concluded that the previously given operating distance of 14,710 km had to be wrong. Since his edit comment read, "I don't know who added this, but the distance from Paris to Brest and back is merely a tenth of that", I guess he assumed the error was a simple extraneous zero. And since the round-trip Paris-Brest-Paris distance is (roughly) a tenth of that, the result seemed correct. But as it turns out, this well-intentioned correction attempt only obfuscated a previous error.

That figure of 14,710 km dated back to the very first version of the page, by Chaparral2J, from 1 May 2008, which included the following text:

"In its inaugural year of 1891, Armand Peugeot decided to show the robustness of his car by taking it alongside the Paris-Brest cycle race. This demonstration car survived a total of 14,710 kilometres (9,140 mi) without major malfunctions, something of a miraculous achievement with contemporary mechanics, and later became the first Peugeot sold to the public."

Looking back at that, I thought the figure must have referred to the total distance run by the car without suffering a major breakdown, rather than the distance covered for the race itself, and so I restored the original figure with that interpretation. In fact, I'm still pretty sure that's what the first author meant; his language is pretty clear.

The problem is that the figure came from a confusing page on Peugeot's own web site. Peugeot no longer has that page, but it has been preserved on the Internet Archive. (Yes, the oldest version of this page on the Archive is from 16 July 2011, while Chaparral wrote his page on 1 May 2008, but he included the same Peugeot link at that time; I think the Internet Archive simply failed to archive this page until 2011.)

"To demonstrate the robustness of his product, Armand Peugeot, who had a flair for publicity, sent a type 3 to follow the famous Paris-Brest cycle race in 1891. The vehicle followed, with no major complications, the Valentigney-Paris-Brest itinerary and return journey, 2,045 km, covered over an average of 14,710 km. This was a colossal distance for the time and this feat caused a sensation, the press publicising this widely. Upon its return to Valentigney, the quadricycle was revised before being delivered to the first owner of a Peugeot automobile vehicle."

As the passage states, the car was driven from Peugeot's factory in Valentigney to Paris, where it ran the race course from Paris to Brest and back, and then it returned to Valentigney. The stated distance of 2,045 km sounds like a reasonable estimate for the run; a Google Maps route for Valentigney-Paris-Brest-Paris-Valentigney, over modern roads but avoiding highways, gives a distance of 2,069 km.

But what does "covered over an average of 14,710 km" mean? Unfortunately, the Internet Archive did not preserve the French version at all, so I can't compare directly, but I can surmise what happened. It seems Chaparral2J assumed "This was a colossal distance for the time" referred to that figure and interpreted it as the total distance run by the car without malfunctions, but I think this was a mistake. To me the phrase looks like a clumsy mistranslation, or perhaps clumsy phrasing in the French version. An "average" distance makes no sense in this context, but an average speed does, and the normal practice in French is to use a comma for the decimal point. So I think this should have read, "covered over an average speed of 14.710 km/h". This would give a time of 139.02 hours. In confirmation, an earlier version of Peugeot's history site, archived on 12 December 2007, has a page which states "In 1891 Peugeot undertakes its first sporting event: the Peugeot “Type 3” quadricycle follows the Paris-Brest cycle race, covering 2,100 km in 139 hours!" (The French version, as archived on 28 September 2007, says the same thing: "En 1891, Peugeot, réalise la première opération de communication par le sport : le quadricycle Peugeot "Type 3" suit la course cycliste Paris-Brest, couvrant 2 100 km en 139 heures !") The later Peugeot page on the Type 3 gives a more precise distance but seems to have used the time of 139 hours to compute the average speed. (Although there is a very slight discrepancy, I assume that's merely from roundoff.)

So I think this solves the mystery of where the figure of "14,710 km" came from. I edited the "World Record" section accordingly.

--Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 19:11, 17 February 2018 (UTC)