page_title: Economy car
section_title: 1930s-1945
hierarchical_section_title: Economy car / History / 1930s-1945
caption_attribution_description: Steyr 50 Baby (1936) Deutsch: Kleinwagen Steyr 50 von 1936 im Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. English: A 1936 Steyr 50 at Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.lanemotormuseum.org/steyr-50-baby-1936
context_page_description: Economy car is a term mostly used in the United States for cars designed for low-cost purchase and operation. Typical economy cars are small, lightweight, and inexpensive to buy. Economy car designers are forced by stringent design constraints to be inventive. Many innovations in automobile design were originally developed for economy cars, such as the Ford Model T and the Austin Mini. The alternative approach, other than innovating to build a low-cost car, is to build a stripped-down, no-frills version of a conventional car.
  Gordon Murray, the Formula 1 and McLaren F1 designer, said when designing his new Murray T.25 city car: "I would say that building a car to sell for six thousand pounds and designing that for a high-volume production, where you have all the quality issues under control, is a hundred times more difficult than designing a McLaren F1, or even a racing car. It is certainly the biggest challenge I've ever had from a design point of view."
context_section_description: In 1931 the DKW F1 was launched. This was the first successful mass-produced front-wheel drive car in the world. It was priced at 1,700 Reichsmarks . (The British 1928-30 Alvis cars 'FWD' models had handling problems and only 150 were made. The British 1929 BSA was a three-wheel competitor to Morgan and the motorcycle combination market, the 1931 four-wheeler was very short-lived. The 1929 U.S. Cord L-29 having been seriously flawed, production ended at 4,429. The 1930 U.S. Ruxton made about 500, production lasted for only four months.) The F1 featured a front-engine, front-wheel-drive layout using a water-cooled 494 cc or 584 cc transverse two-cylinder two-stroke engine with chain drive. This was developed through the 1930s into the 1938 F8 model and the F9 that was not put into production because World War II started, 250,000 were made. By this time DKW had become the largest manufacturer of motorcycles in the world. Their two-stroke engine technology was to appear in the postwar products of Harley-Davidson, BSA, Trabant, Wartburg, Saab, Subaru, Piaggio, Puch, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi, Mazda, Daihatsu, Honda, and Suzuki. The DKW type of two stroke engine was replaced with four strokes in western economy cars by the 1960s, but lived on in stagnating and cash strapped Communist East Germany's Trabant and Wartburg and Communist Poland's FSO Syrena until the 1980s.
  In the late 1920s in Germany, Josef Ganz independent car engineer/inventor and editor of Motor-Kritik magazine had been a fierce opponent of the status quo of car design. He became a consultant engineer to Adler in December 1930. In the first months of 1931, Ganz constructed a lightweight economy car or peoples car, prototype at Adler with a tubular chassis, a mid-mounted engine, and swing axle independent rear suspension. After completion in May 1931, Ganz nicknamed his new prototype Maikäfer (German for cockchafer) which is a species of beetle. In July 1931 he was also consultant engineer to BMW on the 1932-34 BMW 3/20 successor to the BMW 3/15 model. It featured transverse leaf independent front and rear suspension and an updated overhead-valve cylinder head version of the Austin 7 based engine. After a demonstration of the Adler Maikäfer by Ganz, the German Standard Fahrzeugfabrik company (unrelated to the British 'Standard' company), then purchased a license from Ganz to develop and build a small car according to his design. The prototype of this new model, which was to be called Standard Superior, was finished in 1932. It featured a tubular chassis, a mid-mounted engine, and independent wheel suspension with swing-axles at the rear. At about the same time from 1931, two years prior to Hitler's accession to power, Ferdinand Porsche founded Dr. Ing. h. c. F. Porsche GmbH - the Porsche company to offer motor vehicle development work and consulting. Together with Zündapp they developed the prototype Porsche Type 12 "Auto für Jedermann" ("car for everyone"), which was the first time the name "Volkswagen" was used. Porsche preferred a 4-cylinder flat engine, but Zündapp used a water-cooled 5-cylinder radial engine. In 1932 three prototypes were running but were not put into production. All three cars were lost during the war, the last in 1945 in Stuttgart during a bombing raid.
  In Berlin in February 1933, the first production model of the Standard Superior was introduced at the IAMA (Internationale Automobil- und Motorradausstellung). It had a 396 cc 2-cylinder 2-stroke engine. Because of some criticism of the body design, not in the least by Josef Ganz in Motor-Kritik, it was followed in April 1933 by a slightly altered model. In November 1933, the Standard Fahrzeugfabrik introduced yet another new and improved model for 1934, which was slightly longer with one additional window on each side and had a small seat for children or as luggage space in the back. This car was advertised as the German Volkswagen. During the early 1930s German car manufacturers one by one adopted the progressive ideas published in Motor-Kritik since the 1920s. In the meantime in May 1933, 
caption: 1936 Steyr 50 Baby
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