Our latest chapter of something that might be called "How to Go Bankrupt Building Cars" concerns the attempted revival of Holland's original car building firm, founded in 1880 to build carriages by the Spyker brothers. The Spyker brothers were no strangers to innovation and fresh thinking; the 1903 60 hp. racer pictured above was the first four-wheel drive car and featured a mammoth inline 6 cylinder engine of 8.8 liters along with its pioneering 4-wheel brakes. During World War 1 Spyker turned out 100 airplanes and twice as many aero engines, though the Netherlands remained neutral. Right after that catastrophe ended, Spyker produced the forward-looking C1 Aerocoque roadster below, styled by Jaap Tjaarda van Sterkenburg, brother of John Tjaarda (who later designed the Lincoln Zephyr) and uncle of Tom Tjaarda*, whose design credits include the De Tomaso Pantera* and Fiat 124 Spider.
The problem with the idea of reviving the Spyker brand in an appeal to automotive nostalgia is that Spyker stopped making cars in 1926 after experiencing a couple of bankruptcies, including one in 1922, the year the 30/40 Torpedo shown below was built. In its quarter century of building upper-crust cars, the company only managed to turn out around two thousand of them, and only about 20 examples remain...
Not necessarily a solid foundation on which to mount a heritage-based pitch for reviving a car brand. Also, by 1999 when the Spyker Silvestris below was first shown, Spyker's cars had been gone from the scene for 73 years, so that few people were around who remembered the originals. And those few who did remember were not necessarily in the market for a mid-engined, alloy-bodied coupe with limited headroom and not much in the way of design magnetism...
One Spyker tradition the Silvestris honored was using an engine from a German car builder. In the case of the 30/40 from 1922, Spyker had abandoned its own engines for inline sixes sourced from Maybach, and when buyers balked at the car's steep price, Spyker took fewer engines than required by contract, and Maybach went into the car business, competing with Spyker. For the new C8 which appeared in 2000, the 21st century Spyker engineers chose an Audi V8, which later showed up in twin-turbocharged form.
The body design of the C8 unfortunately adopted the severely tapered, conical-section snout of the SIlvestris, with its odd, singly-curved surface between the headlights. Moving from the front to the flanks, it appears the designers decided to distract from the lack of a strong formal theme by applying brignt metal accents around the mirrors and vents. Later on, the headlights were reshaped, but only to emphasize the snout effect, and a chromed air intake showed up on the roof of coupe models.
Spyker complied with the unwritten rule that says supercars need scissor doors and kept the odd, arched tail of the Silvestris prototype, but added more bright metal back there too. The interior displayed even more bright metal along with an engine-turned alloy dash, and the net effect was that here at last was a supercar for people who were nostalgic not for 1920s Amsterdam, but for 1960s Detroit...
At the 2007 Geneva show, Spyker showed the C12 Zagato and announced production plans for a limited series of two dozen to be powered by the VW / Audi / Bentley W12. The car, designed by Zagato's design chief Norihiko Harada, recalled his design for the Lamborghini Raptor*, and displayed more coherence of form and fewer decorative gimmicks than other Spyker offerings, at least in this front 3/4 view...
From the rear it was another story. A transparent version of the classic double bubble Zagato roof collided with a central fin, air intakes cluttered the deck, and the tail was slathered with all the bright metal that had been avoided on the rest of the car. Overall, the design lacked the clarity of Harada's design for Zagato's Diatto Otto Vu* which made its debut at the same show. And Spyker's financial woes meant that only one Zagato C12 was built.
Around 3 years later, Spyker was GM's choice to take ownership of their Saab division, and this bewildering decision to entrust a mass-production operation to a company which had only built a couple hundred cars led to the bankruptcy of Swedish Auto, the Spyker affiliate which took on Saab's debt, in 2011 and eventually bankrutpcy for Spyker, in 2014. After 7 more years in the overcrowded supercar arena, Spyker Cars again filed for bankruptcy in January 2021.
*Footnote + Errata: Our first version of this post credited Tom Tjaarda with the De Tomaso Mangusta design...sorry Giorgetto Giurgiaro; we knew all along it was you. Tom Tjaarda's car designs, including the De Tomaso Pantera, are surveyed in "Architect-Designed Cars Part 4: Tom Tjaarda—Life Before and After the Pantera", our post for April 30, 2020. The Lamborghini Raptor is a subject of "Nineties Concept Cars Part 5", posted January 25, 2019, and the Diatto Otto Vu from the same designer and coachbuilder is a subject of "The Etceterini Files Part 19", posted here on March 11, 2019.
Photo Credits:
Top: Wikimedia
2nd: Spyker Cars
3rd: ritzsite.nl
4th thru 7th: Wikimedia
8th & Bottom: ritzsite.nl
Spyker complied with the unwritten rule that says supercars need scissor doors and kept the odd, arched tail of the Silvestris prototype, but added more bright metal back there too. The interior displayed even more bright metal along with an engine-turned alloy dash, and the net effect was that here at last was a supercar for people who were nostalgic not for 1920s Amsterdam, but for 1960s Detroit...
At the 2007 Geneva show, Spyker showed the C12 Zagato and announced production plans for a limited series of two dozen to be powered by the VW / Audi / Bentley W12. The car, designed by Zagato's design chief Norihiko Harada, recalled his design for the Lamborghini Raptor*, and displayed more coherence of form and fewer decorative gimmicks than other Spyker offerings, at least in this front 3/4 view...
From the rear it was another story. A transparent version of the classic double bubble Zagato roof collided with a central fin, air intakes cluttered the deck, and the tail was slathered with all the bright metal that had been avoided on the rest of the car. Overall, the design lacked the clarity of Harada's design for Zagato's Diatto Otto Vu* which made its debut at the same show. And Spyker's financial woes meant that only one Zagato C12 was built. 
Around 3 years later, Spyker was GM's choice to take ownership of their Saab division, and this bewildering decision to entrust a mass-production operation to a company which had only built a couple hundred cars led to the bankruptcy of Swedish Auto, the Spyker affiliate which took on Saab's debt, in 2011 and eventually bankrutpcy for Spyker, in 2014. After 7 more years in the overcrowded supercar arena, Spyker Cars again filed for bankruptcy in January 2021.
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