The Tatra company in Kopřivnice in the Czech Republic has the distinction of being one of the oldest companies in the world producing motor vehicles with an unbroken history. The company was founded in 1850 as Ignatz Schustala & Cie. In 1890, it became a joint-stock company and was renamed the Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau-Fabriksgesellschaft. In 1897, the Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau-Fabriksgesellschaft produced the Präsident, which was the first factory-produced automobile with a petrol engine to be made in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1918, the company was renamed Kopřivnická vozovka a.s., and in 1919 it changed from the Nesselsdorfer marque to the Tatra badge, named after the nearby Tatra Mountains on the Czechoslovak-Polish border (now on the Polish-Slovak border).
At the beginning of the 1920s, Czech car manufacturers were focusing on producing large and expensive cars which only the rich could afford. Some companies began to introduce less expensive designs, intending them to be affordable for the middle class. Tatra entered this market with its much smaller and cheaper machine, the T11, produced from 1923 to 1927.
Hans Ledwinka, Tatra’s designer, came up with the revolutionary idea of a backbone tube chassis, which he introduced on the Tatra 11. The Tatra 12 followed the same principles: a differential and final drive with swing half-axles mounted at the rear of the backbone tube. The engine was mounted on top of the gearbox on the front of the backbone tube.
The engine was a 1,057cc petrol flat-twin. It was air-cooled, thus avoiding the cost, complexity and difficulty with freezing coolant inherent in water-cooled engines of the time. The front axle had transverse leaf-spring suspension. While the Tatra 11 had drum brakes only on the rear wheels, the Tatra 12, produced from 1926 to 1933, had four-wheel drum brakes.
Hans Ledwinka created the design of the T11 while working for Steyr in Austria. He believed there was a need for a small car, and carried out the work in his own time. His design offered to the Steyr management was rejected. He left the company in 1921 to return to his previous employer, Nesseldorfer, which was soon to become Tatra. 3,847 examples of the T11 and 7,222 examples of the T12 were made.
From 1931 the T12 was joined by the T57 with 1155cc air-cooled flat-four engine, and the T54 with a 1465cc engine of the same configuration; both models were based on the original T11 format. Only 486 T54 models were produced by 1936 when production stopped. However, the more successful T57 was developed in T57A, T57B, and T57K versions, remaining in production until 1948, by which time over 27,000 had been produced, the later models having a 1256cc engine.
Image displayed with the kind permission of the Haynes Motor Museum.
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