The Tatra Story: 1945-1999

We pick up with the story of the Czech Tatra brand where we left off, at the end of WWII.  After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Czechoslovakia became a communist state in 1948 - although Tatra was nationalized in 1946 - and Tatra was renamed Tatra Národní Podnik.  Tatra continued to produce their pre-war models for a brief period (as well as heavy trucks, which by this point they had become well-known for.)  Tatra began designing a clean-sheet model, to be called the (T600) Tatraplan.

The name Tatraplan came from two things - the Soviet 5-year economic plan, as well as the Czech word for airplane (Eroplan), noting the cars aeromotive inspirations.

The T600 continued to use the Tatra backbone chassis concept, but the powertrain was a departure: the V8 was replaced by a pushrod air-cooled flat 4 displacing 2L.  The flat four had a low compression ratio (6.0:1) and made 52 horsepower, a ways shy of it's V8 ancestors - propelling the T600 to 100km/h in a leisurely 22 seconds.  This model was again designed by Hans Ledwinka, along with Josef Chalupa and Vladimir Popelar, with an emphasis on aerodynamics - with the CoD standing at a still low 0.32.

The T600 was assembled in the Tatra plant from 1948-1951, when the state moved production to the Skoda plant.  This was done to free up production for Tatra trucks, but the Tatraplan was only assembled in the Skoda plant for one year, with production ending in 1952.

The actual market for the Tatraplan was pretty restricted - it was only intended for purchase by government departments, ministries or state security, so your average Joe couldn't just order one.  There were a total of 6,342 made during that time span, with about 2,100 of them coming out of the Skoda plant.  As far as exports go; no, there wasn't ever a Tatra dealer around the corner from your house in Wisconsin.  The largest numbers were exported to Austria (435) and China (200) but they went as far away as Sweden and Australia.

The styling is just out of this world, though.  For all the weird backbone chassis, flat-four oddity of the Tatraplan, it's that long, raking back end with an tailfin that does it for me.  That and the fared-in rear wheels, and how the window line slowly drops as it heads back - it's just a gorgeous car, and still looks a bit like a UFO.

After the end of T600 (Tatraplan) production in 1952, Tatra replaced it with the T603, which of all the Tatra cars is the most likely to be familiar to people who aren't obsessed with arcane eastern European cars like myself.  Not to say it was any more conventional in it's appearance.

Bizarre is too easy of a word to describe the styling.  While the Tatraplan looked like a streamlined Beetle, the T603 looked a lot like a domesticated UFO mixed with a Salvador Dali painting.  The 603 was designed as transportation for state officials, who were growing weary of poorly designed and made Soviet luxury cars (like the East German Sachsenring P240, made by the same company that produced the Trabant.)  So Tatra was ordered to design a luxury car again, and with it came the return of the air-cooled V8 engine.

A revised version of the 2.5L OHC V8 from the pre-war T87 was re-used for the 603, again mounted behind two firewalls in the rear of the car - with a luggage compartment in front of it.  Power output ranged from 94-105bhp, fairly similar to the old T87 motor.  The gearbox was a 4-speed manual with a column-mounted shifter, and the 603 could be ordered with "mountain gearing" (presumably a shorter final drive ratio).    One of the biggest improvements was a wider rear window - previous Tatras were not strong on rearward visibility.  On early triple-headlight 603's, the center headlight turned with the steering rack to aid visibility.

The 603 was in production for quite a long time by modern standards; but keep in mind this was a hand-built car designed for state officials; change wasn't high on the priority list.  The 603 went into production in 1956, and got it's first facelift in 1962 - the bizarre triple-headlight arrangement was changed for two pairs of faired-in headlights.  This model was called the 2-603 (the Soviets weren't particularly creative with their naming schemes, apparently.)

Pictured above is the 3-603 model, which had flush-mounted quad headlamps instead of the earlier fared-in units, making the car slightly more normal looking.  Other gradual improvements over the lifespan included power brakes(!) in 1966, and a switch from drums at all four wheels to discs in 1968.  Tatra's concept of "new and used" cars was pretty different from today's norm as well;  often a Tatra would return to the factory for refurbishing, and it would be upgraded to the newest styling and mechanical components (ignition, brakes, etc) and resold as new.  For this reason, a lot of early triple-headlight 603's became later 603-2's, and production numbers are a little "muddy."

What's really odd about the 603 is it's competition history.  Competition history for, say, a Mustang - not weird.  Competition history for a car designed as government transportation in the USSR?  Very weird.  There was a competition version of the 603, called the 603 B5, that was entered in a number of races and rallies.  A Czech team restored a Type 2 603 to the spec of the period race car, which is seen above at the Goodwood Revival in 2008.

The competition version of the 603 ditched the single carb for quadruple Weber 35's, and produced a healthy 160bhp on a 10.5:1 compression ratio.  It also used "Ejector Cooling," basically a valve to vent heat from the block for cooler running.  The original 603-B5 race car ran in a number of events; and while it wasn't the fastest thing, it's durability was an asset: a class win in the '59 Austrian Alpine Cup, a class win at Spa-Sofia-Liege in '64, 2nd and 3rd in class at Marathon de la Route 1965, among other victories in Czech races.

The 603 was in production for a long time - 1952-1974.  It's replacement was largely similar under the skin, but entirely different on the outside.  Gone was the bizarre, rounded styling - the 613's body was styled by Italian design house Vignale, and they did a good job of disguising the location of the car's engine.  The biggest change was the engine: the old T87-based V8 was finally replaced by a new 3.5L V8.  Still carb-fed, the larger motor also featured quad camshafts (the 603 2.5L had a single camshaft per bank) and significantly more power, rated at 165 horsepower.

The transmission was still a 4-speed manual (it's interesting to note that Tatra, at no point in their 100+ years of making cars, ever actually sold a car with an automatic), but the rear subframe arrangement was improved.  The swing axles, used since the earliest T77's, were replaced with semi-trailing arms (which reduce the amount of camber change under cornering load, and thus turning stability), and the differential was integrated into the transmission, which moved the engine forward, basically right atop the rear axles.  This gave the 613 50/50 static weight distribution, despite having a big heavy V8 mounted over the rear axle.  For some reason Audi still can't get this one right even with their V8's at the other end...

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8JK3_nIjLM

The 613 was a much more rapid car than the 603, able to reach 100km/h in around 12.5 seconds in original form, with tall highway gearing.  The 613 could do 116mph flat out, which probably wasn't as spooky with the new rear suspension.   Other interesting features included two separate gas-powered interior heaters (since air-cooled engines are notoriously bad at heating cabins, due to not having any coolant!), and a split gas tank with a single filler.

Like the 603, the 613 went through a number of revisions during it's rather long lifespan.  The 613-2 came along in 1980 with minor cosmetic changes and better fuel economy.  The 613-3 came after, with a range of somewhat unfortunate stylistic changes - stripped of all the chrome trim and bumpers, with a flat plastic panel between the headlights, it looked decidedly dowdy.

The big news came for 1990.  With the fall of communism, Tatra suddenly found itself competing with Western manufacturers that hadn't been making the same exact car since the early 70's - economic models and all that.  To compete with luxury sedans like BMW's and Jaguar's, the 613 needed to comply with new emissions regulations, as well as a dire need for more power.  Tatra enlisted the help of Tim Bishop (formerly of Jaguar) to modernize the 613's engine.  The carburetor was replaced with electronically-controlled sequential multi-port fuel injection, and a host of emissions devices now resided under the "hood" as well.  Revisions to the cylinder heads and cams increased power from 165bhp to 200bhp (at a pretty high 5,750rpm), although the 613-4 had a feature which decoupled the belt-driven cooling fan at wide open throttle, allowing a maximum output of 220bhp.  The transmission was updated to a five-speed manual, and these changes allowed the 613-4 to reach 100km/h in around 9 seconds (thanks to tall gearing, it could do more than 70mph in second gear!) and a top speed of 143mph, along with better fuel economy.

The final revision of the 613 model came in 1993.  The gearbox was fitted with a shorter final drive, which lowered the 0-100km/h time down to a fairly quick 7.5 seconds, although top speed was 134mph - the taller gearing was an option for those who mostly drove on highways.  The 613 would stay in production until 1996, when it was replaced by the final Tatra car - the T700.

The T700 was mostly a stylistic revision of the T613 series 5, and by the time it came out in '96 it was clear this was going to be the end of the line for Tatra cars.  As undeniably cool as the Tatras were, by 1996 choices in the European luxury market were pretty far ahead of it.  Mercedes-Benz would happily sell you an S-class that was built like a bank vault, with a 6.0L quad-cam 48v V18 cranking out nearly 400bhp up front.  BMW had the V12 750iL, there was the Jaguar XJ12, and the aluminum-intensive Audi A8 Quattro, with it's sophisticated V8 and AWD system.  Still, the fact they made the T700 at all is pretty damn cool.

The T700's interior catered more towards Western luxury tastes than the somewhat somber 613's, with leather and wood and all sorts of gizmos.  It's sort of haphazard, like a mixture of Saab 9000 and kit car.  Still, the lack of a driveshaft running through the cabin meant it was quite spacious.

The "base" engine was still the 3.5L 90° air-cooled V8, mounted smack-dab over the rear axle powering a five-speed transmission.  There was an option of a 4.4L V8 which made 237bhp as well, but the most interesting was the T700GT (picture above) - the most overtly sporting production Tatra, not including one-offs like the T600-2 race car, or the T603-B5.  The GT was built on the shorter wheelbase chassis, and hunkered down closer to the ground on a set of Quattro-lookalike alloys.  The engine was a hand-assembled variant of the 4.4L V8, bored out to 4.5L and making over 300bhp.  With weight reduced by 300kg (putting it closer to 1500kg) the T700GT was probably a fairly rapid, oversteer-prone car.  Unfortunately, due to extremely low production numbers (Tatra production had slowed to a crawl by the late 90's), good luck finding a road test of a T700 anywhere.  Or any truly accurate information, for that matter.

Tatra finally threw in the towel on car production in 1999 to focus on what had always made them the most money: production of commercial vehicles.  Unless I've missed something, the 1999 T700 was the last air-cooled roadgoing production car, outliving the air-cooled Porsche 911 by one year.  Certainly an odd comparison there - and it's interesting to note the divergent engineering paths of Hans Ledwinka and Ferdinand Porsche by the late 90's!  By the time the T700 went away, it was hopelessly out of date, an anachronism from another time period - a luxury car for a social set that no longer existed.  But in your heart of hearts, which would you rather have - the bizarre looking, air cooled T700GT with it's hand-built rear-mid-engine V8, or an Audi A6 2.8?

That's what I thought.

I would like to say that finding information on Tatras past the 603 is a daunting task.  This article would not have been possible without information and pictures from sites like Tatra Register UK, The Tatra T700 Facebook page, the Czech Tatra 603 team, etc.  If you want more nerdy in-depth history of forgotten brands, drop me an email at james@carthrottle.com!