Tatra's streamlined cars left their fingerprints on the Volkswagen Beetle
In 1965 Volkswagen quietly paid the Ringhoffer family one million Deutschmarks to settle a claim that dated back to the 1930s. Czech carmaker Tatra had sued over patents, arguing the Beetle copied its rear-engined, air-cooled designs, until Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia halted the case.
Tatra began in 1850 in Kopřivnice building horse-drawn carriages, moved into railway wagons in the 1880s, and in 1897 produced the Präsident, the first factory-built petrol car in Central and Eastern Europe, inspired by a Benz its technical director had bought. Its first truck followed a year later. The Tatra name, taken from the nearby mountains, arrived in 1919, making the firm the world's third oldest motor manufacturer with an unbroken history.
Engineer Hans Ledwinka shaped its identity. His 1923 Tatra 11 used a rigid central backbone tube with swinging rear half-axles and an air-cooled engine, and in 1934 the Tatra 77 became the first production car designed around aerodynamics, a scale model recording a drag coefficient of 0.2455. Hitler rode in Tatras and dined with Ledwinka, and Ferdinand Porsche admitted the two engineers sometimes looked over each other's shoulders. The 1936 Tatra 97 shared the Beetle's rear boxer engine, front luggage space and central tunnel.
Under occupation, production continued partly because Germans liked the cars, though so many officers crashed the heavy rear-engined machines on corners that the brand earned the joke nickname Czech Secret Weapon. After nationalisation, the hand-built Tatra 603 of the 1950s was reserved for Communist officials and foreign leaders; Fidel Castro had a white one with air conditioning. Old 603s were often returned, refurbished to current spec and reissued as new, which makes their histories hard to trace.
The last passenger car, the Tatra 700, ended in 1999 after fewer than 75 were built. Today the company makes heavy off-road trucks on the same backbone chassis principle, including military models and a civilian range with DAF cabs, and it has recently added hybrid, battery and fuel-cell drivetrains.
Source: Tatra (company)
