Steyr in the twenties
10/14/2011
The picture was too sweet to just sit on a quietly humming hard disk. But what is the story behind it?
Today we know Steyr mainly in combination with Puch and as a relative of Fiat and its version of the Fiat 500, but the history of Steyr goes back much further and begins as early as 1864 with the manufacture of weapons. It was not until 1916 that Steyr decided to enter into automobile production.
The talented designer Hans Ledwinka was recruited, who moved from Tatra to Steyr in 1916 as the newly appointed chief designer for automobiles and already brought with him the design plans for the first Steyr passenger car, a robust 3.3-liter six-cylinder car.
Due to the First World War, this passenger car did not appear until 1920 and bore the model designation "Type II". Although the first Steyr car had a conventional chassis, it had a highly modern engine for its time. The Steyr automobiles with their typical pointed radiator were soon not only seen more and more frequently on the roads of Austria, but soon also gained an excellent reputation far beyond Austria due to their elegance and mechanical qualities. Between 1920 and 1924, 2,150 Type IIs left the Steyr factory.
The Steyr models IV, V, VI, VII and XVI were built on the technical basis of the Type II, albeit without the help of Ledwinka, who had already returned to Tatra in 1921.
In the second half of the 1920s, assembly line production was then introduced with the Type XII, a smaller and simpler model. With 11,124 vehicles produced between 1926 and 1928, the car was a great success. The picture above shows the Steyr XII. It is interesting to note that, according to the technical data of the time, the chassis weighed 750 kg and was designed for a top speed of 100 km/h. The car had four fixed seats. The vehicle had four fixed seats and, in the taximeter version, two additional emergency seats.
We will soon be reporting in more detail on the Steyr brand and its early days.
