Wandering through the fall concours at the LeMay Museum in Tacoma some years back, I encountered the Glaser-bodied Steyr 220 Sport pictured below. It was the first Steyr I'd ever seen, despite quite a few years of attending car shows. The Steyr, built in Austria, sometimes gets shoved out of the spotlight by other Mitteleuropean machinery, like the big Austro-Daimlers designed between the wars by Ferdinand Porsche, and the rear-engined Tatras designed by the even more iconoclastic Hans Ledwinka*. The Tatras were generally no bigger than the Steyrs, but it's not easy to ignore a teardrop-shaped car with three headlights and a central dorsal fin. The charms of the Steyr were a bit more subtle...
Here was a car with stylistic connections to contemporary work by Graber* in Switzerland, echoing the same restrained approach to streamlining, with none of the chrome-laden excess of the heavier, late-1930s roadsters from Mercedes and Horch...
The 220 was indeed lighter than those cars, powered by an inline, OHV six of just under 2.3 liters. Front suspension was independent and rear suspension was by swing axles. The two-passenger Sport Roadster shown was one of six bodied in this style by Glaser in Dresden. There was also a five-passenger cabriolet and a more common sedan. The basic engine made 55 horsepower; the subject car makes 85 with dual carbs and dual exhausts.
Overall, around 5,900 of the 220 series were built. There was also a 2 liter six called the 120 and a 2.1 liter called the 125, both using the same basic chassis layout. In addition, there were similar models using four cylinder engines, called (illogically) the 100 and 200. A 200 series sedan is shown below...
The sedans were not without charm, with fastback lines and center-opening doors without a "B" pillar, as on Lancias from this period. In June 1942, a Steyr 220 sedan was the vehicle used in a harrowing escape from the Auschwitz death camp by four prisoners who had stolen Nazi SS uniforms and weapons. The prisoners had also stolen the Steyr from the camp commandant, and they were never re-captured...
The 220 shown below is a 5-passenger cabriolet; these were somewhat more common than the Sport Roadster. Various two-tone color schemes were available on all the Steyr models.
In 1934, Steyr merged with Austro-Daimler and Puch. One of the first products to appear after the merger was the 1936 Steyr Type 50, also known as the Baby. The Baby featured a front-mounted four cylinder boxer engine with thermosiphon water cooling and about 22 hp driving the rear wheels through a 4-speed gearbox. Advantages over the VW prototypes which appeared during this era included hydraulic brakes and greater space efficiency. Production of the Baby, including the Type 55 with longer wheelbase and more power, amounted to about 13,000 units before car fabrication stopped in 1940.
The Baby proved predictive of the path that Steyr would take after World War 2, when postwar austerity and material shortages emphasized the value of small, economical cars. This led to a Steyr-Daimler-Puch alliance with Fiat and eventually to a successful rear-engined Steyr Puch minicar, but first Steyr tried mounting its own 2 liter engine in bodies made by Fiat for their 1400 and 1900 series cars. These conventional front-engined cars, shown below, have been eclipsed in the public memory by the much more successful Steyr-engined versions of Fiat's Nuova 500 from 1957.
With their version of the rear-engined Fiat 500, Steyr Puch hit upon a successful formula. They saved tooling costs for bodywork by using the Fiat body shells, but replaced the inline two-cylinder air-cooled Fiat engine of 500cc (30 cubic inches) with their own horizontally-opposed, air-cooled twin. It was a much smoother engine, and similar power units were employed in the all-wheel drive Steyr Puch Haflinger off-road vehicles. As with the Fiat version, the early Steyr Puch 500 had rear-hinged "suicide" doors giving access to four seats...
A 650cc version of this car won the European Rally Championship in 1966, and other rally successes followed. The little car gained enough of a following that Steyr kept it in production from 1957 to 1975. Note that the faux grille features Steyr and Puch insignia, and even mentions Fiat in tiny script, but fails to mention Daimler, which was still perhaps associated only with large cars in the minds of middle Europeans...
This being basically a Fiat chassis design, there had to be a 2 passenger sports version, and it had a name bigger than the car, as noted on the commemorative Austrian stamp below. It carried a larger version of the trusty Steyr Puch opposed twin, while a 500cc variant won its class at the Nurburgring. That "Imp" business has nothing to do with the British car of the same name. It refers to the manufacturer who built 21 of these handsome alloy-bodied coupes: Intermeccanica. Really, the car is a Steyr Puch Intermeccanica 700GT, and it qualifies, like Intermeccanica, as a chapter in the etceterini saga involving Americans, Italians and Austrians. But that's a story for another day...
*Footnotes: Czechoslovakia's Tatra automobiles can be found in our post for November 27, 2016 entitled "Cars & Ethics: A Word or Two on VW", in "Rolling Sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art" for December 31, 2016, and in "When Mobile Homes Really Were Mobile" from July 30, 2017. Bodies by Hermann Graber on Alvis, Duesenberg and Talbot chassis are reviewed in "Forgotten Classic: The Graber Alvis" from January 22, 2016.
Photo Credits:
Top thru 3rd from top: the author
4th thru 7th: wikimedia
8th: Steyr Daiimler Puch advertising, reprinted at autoalmanach.ch
9th & 10th: wikimedia
11th: onlineshop.post.at
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