The Cord Front Drive of 1929-32 has always been celebrated as a beautiful car, but the stuff on the inside is equally interesting.

Just to be clear, the Cord L-29 of 1929-32 wasn’t the first front-wheel drive automobile produced in the USA, not by any means. Earlier examples include the 1917 Frontmobile of New Jersey and the fantastic machines of J. Walter Christie beginning in 1905, to name a few. Even the crude and somewhat hypothetical 1877 Selden Motor Wagon was designed to drive the front wheels, oddly enough. So nope, front-wheel drive was never really new. It’s always been with us.

Choosing our words more carefully, we could say the Cord, which entered production in June of 1929, became the first successful volume-built front-drive car in the USA. (Another front-drive car, the Ruxton, appeared the same year as Cord but was not successful.) And as an early adopter of front-wheel drive, the Cord featured a number of novel engineering features that are worth a closer look.

In the simplest terms, the L-29 drivetrain (above) might be described as a conventional rear-drive package turned around backward to drive the front wheels. This single step eliminated the bulky driveshaft and live rear axle, permitting a much lower profile than the conventional cars of the day—the key element in the Cord’s distinctive appearance. The drivetrain unit also required an impressively long hood, another defining factor of the L-29’s exterior package. To balance out the proportions, the wheelbase was a full 137.5 inches.

The L-head straight 8 was a standard Lycoming MD/MDA engine (Lycoming was then part of the Cord manufacturing empire) modified for reverse rotation. With a displacement of 298.6 cubic inches the engine produced 125 hp, not nearly enough to propel a 4700-lb luxury vehicle, and late in the production run the displacement was boosted to 322.1 cubic inches. A conventional Detroit Gear three-speed transmission connected to a hypoid gearset (mounted upside down, with the pinion on top) and differential, and the 12-inch hydraulic front brakes were mounted inboard. Meanwhile, a large-diameter De Dion tube supported the spindles and maintained camber on both front wheels.

Errett Lobban Cord himself actively supervised the development process, which was performed on the West Coast early on by consultants Harry Miller, C.W. Van Ranst, and Tommy Milton. Cord was taken with the sensational front-drive Miller Indy cars and had purchased the rights to the design, but Van Ranst (aided by Cord’s friend, Leon Duray) was able to convince him that the Miller’s transverse-outboard gearbox was unsuitable for road use. The production L-29 adopted a layout more like Van Ranst’s front-drive Indy racer, the 1927 Detroit Special. Despite his lack of formal education, not even a high-school diploma, Van Ranst was one of the most accomplished automotive engineers of his time.

The factory illustration above provides a closer look at the details. Much like the front-drive Indy cars it borrowed from, the L-29 used a pair of quarter-elliptic leaf springs on each side to provide both location and suspension. While the paired springs offered some mutual self damping, there was a hefty Houdaille hydraulic shock absorber on each wheel as well. In lieu of Rzeppa joints to provide articulation on the ends of each axle, like most front-drive cars of today, the Cord used two conventional Hooke’s joints in tandem to provide constant shaft velocity. Rzeppa joints were available by then and the Cord team gave them a trial, but they were deemed unproven and too expensive.

As the first automobile to bear the Cord name, the L-29 was to be built in a production run of 5,000 vehicles in the first year, then replaced by an improved design to be called the L-30. (Company advertising generally referred to the car as simply the Cord Front Drive without any model designation.) Prices initially ranged from $3095 to $3295, firmly in Cadillac V8 territory. However, the Great Depression soon put an end to the original sales target and the first and only production run stretched out into December of 1931. According to Cord historian Josh Malks, exactly 5,010 cars were assembled. There wouldn’t be another vehicle wearing a Cord emblem until the fabulous 810 appeared in 1936.