Weird car facts from around the world #KenyanTraffic

The French made ware no.1 car makers

Although the car was invented by German Karl Benz, it wasn’t the Germans who dominated car production in the earliest days of motoring. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was the Americans – but it wasn’t them either, nor the Brits. Until 1906 it was the French who made more cars than any other nation. America took over in 1907.

Volvo’s 4 reverse gears

Volvo built its first car in 1927. Known unofficially as the Jakob and officially as the OV4, the first example of this large four-seater tourer was driven out of the company’s workshop on 14 April  and promptly back in again – because the rear axle had been assembled incorrectly, resulting in the car having four reverse gears and just one to move the car forwards.

Ford Model T once ruled the world

In 2020, car buyers have never had such a bewildering number of makes and models to choose between – or such an array of powertrains either. But things were simpler a century ago with the Henry Ford’s Model T (pictured) dominating new car sales around the globe. In fact the car was so popular that it’s reckoned half of the cars on the world’s roads in 1920 were Ford Model Ts.

The Titanic car

When the Titanic sank in 1912 it had a solitary car in its hold – a brand new Renault Type CB Coupé de Ville. The car was bought by William Carter of Pennsylvania, while he was touring Europe with his wife and two children. The Renault was then loaded on to the Titanic when the Carters returned home – only to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic, never to be seen again. And yes, it’s the car you see play an, ahem, important role in the blockbusting 1997 movie. The Carters happily all survived the sinking. Auctioneers RM Sothebys sold an example for $270,000 in 2008 (pictured).

The first mass-produced car wasn’t a Ford

Ford is often credited with inventing the moving production line. But the Curved Dash Oldsmobile (pictured) was the world’s first mass-produced car, introduced in 1901 – the Model T didn’t appear until 1908. Despite this, Henry Ford took his inspiration from the clockmaking and armaments industries, with his production line cutting manufacturing times from 12.5 hours to just 1.5 hours. Incidentally, the reason why his Model T came only in black for a while, was that it was the only colour that dried fast enough to keep up with the rate of production.

EV broke 1st speed record

The first land speed record was broken in December 1898 – by an electric car named Jeantaud Duc (pictured), travelling at 39.24mph. The next five records were all broken by electric cars, which raised the bar to 65.79mph. The seventh record was broken by a steam car (75.06mph) – it wasn’t until the eighth record that a car powered by an internal combustion engine reigned supreme. That was in 1902, when William K Vanderbilt drove his Mors to 76.03mph.

Samsung cars

Yes, that Korean company that makes your phone and your TV briefly also made cars. It started in 1994 but was clobbered by the Asian financial crisis of 1998. It sold the company to Renault in 2000.

First robots from Ford

In the 1950s at a Ford engine factory in Cleveland, Ohio, a Ford executive proudly showed off some of the firm’s first robots to the United Auto Workers union boss Walter Reuther (1907-1970).

He quipped “Walter, how are you going to collect union dues from these guys?” Reuther shot back: “How are you going to get these guys to buy your cars?”

Hitler never learned to drive

After Adolf Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, the fuel tanks of his now redundant motor pool were drained to obtain the fuel to burn his body. A huge fan of cars, he never learned how to drive.

First electric cars

No, the first electric cars were not Teslas, milk floats or dodgems. The first one appeared in 1884, invented by the Briton Thomas Parker (1843-1915), a year before the first car equipped with an internal combustion engine (ICE) from Karl Benz. Electric power was very popular in the motor car’s early days – especially as they didn’t require cranking to start – and only gave way to the ICE as the latter became much better and more practical.

And electric starters arrived to solve the cranking problem, pioneered by Cadillac in 1912.

Lamborghini tractors

Lamborghini is famous today for making some of the world’s fastest and most glamorous supercars. But it started out making tractors – and the original firm still does; the sports car side is today owned by Audi. Lamborghini’s biggest and baddest tractor today until recently was called the R8 (pictured), a name it shares with the fastest Audi.

Porsche also produced tractors for a period in the ‘50s and early ‘60s.

Cities that Henry Ford  built

In 1928 Henry Ford built a town by a river in Brazil in order to secure supplies of rubber for his cars built in America. Strict rules in accordance with Ford’s beliefs governed the townspeople’s behaviour, including a ban on alcohol, tobacco and even women, and they were fed American food which they didn’t like very much. 

After growing frictions, the town was relocated in 1934, and both towns were sold back to the Brazilian government in 1945. Ford wasted $208 million in modern money on the project – and Henry Ford never visited either town.

Jaguar the SS car

Jaguar was until the Second World War known as SS Cars – SS standing for Swallow Sidecar. Given the notoriety the Nazi SS organisation gained during the war – and the company’s badge (pictured inset) hardly helped matters – in March 1945 the firm sensibly renamed itself to a model name, Jaguar, as the Nazis and the SS were approaching a warmly welcomed demise. This is a SS Jaguar from the late 1930s.

Origin of Mercedes-Benz names

Ever wondered why the first half of this most German of companies has a Hispanic female name? In the late-19th century, Emil Jellinek (1853-1918) would buy Daimler vehicles and modify them for racing, and gave his cars the moniker Mercedes, named after his apparently beautiful daughter, Mercédès (pictured), who was born to his Franco-Algerian wife Rachel Goggmann Cenrobert. Daimler liked the changes so much they launched its first Mercedes-branded car in 1900. 

Daimler and Benz merged in 1926, creating Daimler-Benz, whose vehicles would thereafter be named Mercedes-Benz. Mercédès herself sadly died of cancer in 1929, aged just 39 – and didn’t apparently share her father’s love for cars.

Renault’s topless American dream

Renault tried cozying up to convertible-hungry American buyers by chopping the roof off the 9, christened Alliance on the other side of the pond. It was brilliant on paper, but motorists quickly decided getting a tan on the motorway wasn’t worth putting up with the intimidating quality issues that plagued Renault’s Wisconsin-built cars.

The addition of a high-performance, GTA-badged model for the 1987 model year did little to boost sales. Production ended when Renault left North America in 1988, its interests there sold to Chrysler.

Here’s the only metric everyone agrees on

The motor industry is plagued with different metrics to measure the same thing, usage dependent on the country. For example, Power has at least four  measurements: horsepower, brake horsepower, and PS (Pferdestärke), which are very similar but none exactly the same as another. In 1992, the EU deemed a new power standard, kilowatts. Gallons are not the same; the US uses gallons that are 17% smaller than the gallons used in Britain, and much of the rest of the world uses litres, the metric standard.

The only automotive metric that is standard? Wheel sizes. Yes, even places like Europe which abandoned non-metric measurements decades or indeed centuries ago still use inches. Getting the correct tyres are vitally important to car safety, and we can all be glad that, for once, everyone decided on something, and have stuck to it.

Peugeot created the Porsche 911

Well, not quite but hear us out. Porsche’s replacement for the 356 was to be called 901. However, Peugeot protested, saying that only it could launch cars with three-digit names with zero in the middle, so it was changed to the number that would become a legend: 911.

How did Alfa Romeo get its name?

Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili (the Lombardy Car Manufacturing Company) was set up in 1910 and taken over by industrialist Nicola Romeo (1876-1938) in 1915. He merged his name with ALFA and we get ALFA Romeo – one part is an acronym and the other isn’t…

Do you know how “Magnetic Energy Polarisers” came about

GM’s Australian division Holden had a performance arm called the Holden Dealer Team (HDT) run by enigmatic race car driver Peter Brock (1945-2006). In 1986 Brock began to install a gadget dubbed the “Energy Polariser” into HDT vehicles. The machine contained crystals and magnets in an epoxy resin that, he claimed, improved the performance and handling of vehicles through “aligning the molecules”. 

GM was not impressed by this theory and total lack of any evidence-based benefits, and dropped its association with Brock. It set up Holden Special Vehicles instead, in conjunction with Scottish businessman Tom Walkinshaw. Brock died in an accident in 2006 during a rally, aged 61.

Ford Aeroplanes

Ford started making planes in 1925, and 199 of its three-engined 4-AT-E Trimotor airliner were built up to 1933 (pictured). It was briefly the world’s largest maker of commercial aircraft, and at the same time Ford began the world’s first regularly scheduled commercial cargo airline. Henry Ford gradually lost interest after his personal pilot was killed in a crash flying a Ford Flivver prototype monoplane in 1928, and then his company was buffeted by the great depression. 

During World War Two Ford produced the B-24 Liberator bomber under licence at its factory at Willow Run, Michigan. In the 1950s, a new Ford division built Sidewinder air-to-air missiles for the US Air Force, before Ford sold the business in 1990.

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