Samson Motorcars

Samson Maschinenbau is a now-defunct American luxury car brand, that sold cars from 1982 to 1988.

## History

It all started in 1980, when Erich Samson, a wealthy German immigrant living in the US, had the idea for a car that was both affordable and luxurious. So, just like that, he and his best friend Lukas Müller went to work on designing what would be the first ever car from Samson Maschinenbau, using pen and paper.

Since Erich had a healthy amount of money, he was able to hire more people to help design new cars, and even eventually bought himself an old warehouse, which he turned into a small factory. This would be the only Samson factory in the world. In June of 1982, Samson came out with their first ever car, called the Reliant.

The Reliant was built to be a prestigious luxury car, coming with a leather interior and anti-lock brakes, and it did that very well. But there was just one thing that kept people from buying it: its price. In 1982, the first ever Samson Reliants cost over $60,000 (about $176,000 today). By February of 1983, the Reliant was gone. In eight months, Samson had built around 200,000 Reliants, and only sold 501.

Erich Samson realized his company was very quickly running out of money, so he needed a backup plan. He called up his best designers to create something that was small and practical, but luxurious at the same time. In the end, the designers thought they had something that might sell, so they showed it to Erich and Lukas.

The car was called the Royal, and it was a hatchback, with slightly less luxury, but far more practicality. It was much cheaper, too, costing around $25,000 (about $73,000 today). Admittedly, the car still wasn’t cheap, but Erich thought that it would sell far better than the Reliant. By April of 1984, the Royal hit the streets. But this car sold even worse than the Reliant did. By the time the Royal was canceled in March of 1987, 150,000 Royals were built, and only 278 were sold, until they changed the way they sold cars.

It was around this time that Erich and Lukas started to panic. They were running out of money even quicker than before, so they had to design something that was cheap to make, but also still luxurious and practical. The two men know that this was almost impossible, but they tried their hardest to come up with something. This was in July of 1986. They hired even more designers, a few of them coming from such brands as Bentley and Rolls Royce, to try and come up with and design a car that they knew people would actually buy. At one of their meetings, on July 8th, a Scottish designer by the name of Mark Shetland came up with the idea to give people a free car if they bought a Royal. The team thought this was a fairly good idea to sell more Royals.

By late August, the designers had come up with a brand new car that wasn’t like the others. This car had a cassette radio, hand-made leather interior, hydro-pneumatic suspension, and a 5.3 liter flat-plane V8 pushing out as much as 260 horsepower. The car would be called the Noble Deluxe, dubbed by the company “The Pinnacle of Luxury”. This would be the car they would give out for free when people bought a Royal.

Seeing that the Royal would definitely sell better, Lukas and Erich bumped up the price of a Royal to $30,000 (about $75,000 today). After a few months, the company realized that this was working. Erich had some of his team send out flyers for the Samson Royal, and people realized that they got another free car if they bought one. This led many more people to buy a Royal, and the company was going out of bankruptcy!

Lukas had another idea, so he told Erich. His idea was to give 200 Samson Noble Deluxes to the United States government. This is eventually what they ended up doing, and the government had all 200 cars armored. Lukas’ thinking was that if people saw that the Noble Deluxe was good enough for the US government, it would be good enough for them, too. In fact, one Noble Deluxe became Ronald Reagan’s favorite car to be driven around in. Samson Maschinenbau saw this as a huge win. Certainly, now that people saw the President of the United States being driven around in one of these, they had to get one!

Well, that’s not exactly what happened. In fact, two things that *weren’t* what they expected to happen, happened. First, the flat-plane V8 engine, called the FP8, was not designed very well, and was prone to overheating and eventually catching fire. Second, this actually happened to the President once when he was at a parade in mid-1987. The engine caught fire and the driver suffered 2nd degree burns as a result.

When Erich and Lukas heard the news of this, they realized they were screwed. The government was going to sue them, there was no question. Despite all their attempts to sell more Royals and Noble Deluxes, the government did end up suing the company in mid-1988, for $1,000,000. It was at this time that Samson Maschinenbau had completely run out of money. They filed for bankruptcy in June of 1988, the same month that their first car had come out, 6 years ago.

By the end of the entire company, Samson Maschinenbau only sold 1,932 cars in total, having sold 501 Reliants, 453 Royals, and 700 Nobel Deluxes.

Of course, this did not stop Erich and Lukas’ friendship. They remained best friends until Lukas’ death of leukemia in 2000.

Erich Samson eventually died in his sleep in 2005.

Nowadays, the value of any Samson vehicle, whether it be a Reliant, Royal, or Nobel Deluxe, has skyrocketed, since they are so rare. People are paying up to $200,000 for a base model Nobel Deluxe.

Vehicle List (incomplete
 Royal
 Reliant