Packard Forum Index » Pre-War (1899-1942)

I have been reading the history of ELCAR which was a assembled car built in Elkhart, Indiana from 1908 to 1931.

In the article it stated that 18 firms in 1917 such Continental, Northway, Weidly and Lycoming ( which is located in my home town of Williamsport, Penna.) built engines for 71 different automobile companies.

John F. Shireman

When I still lived near Lima, Ohio in the 70's, a local man had a late 20's Elcar sedan. Still running and driving, and all original (I think).

I had never heard of them until then.

My father owned a 1962 Checker Marathon powered by a Continental flathead 6. It had an automatic transmission and was S-L-O-W!

I think it was the Elcar company that built the last two Mercers; a chassis and a convertible coupe in 1931.

John

Elcar was an assembled car built in Elkhart, Indiana. I'll look it up later and report back more, but I think they were in business for a number of years. Their production wasn;t very high. I don't remember seeing one at car shows when I was a kid in Indiana.

The building is still standing, it is the woodwind plant for Selmer USA, now called Conn-Selmer. The Bundy clarinets or flutes you played in school were made in that building. I took a tour there as part of my job in the spring of 1991.

Sadly, many of those jobs have gone to Asia too

Regards


John Harley

I've worked on some Weirdly cars but they were not labeled as such.

Perhaps you mean Weidley.

In the early days there were hundreds of cars and trucks that used bought out engines.

There was an interesting court case in the 30s. The US government let a contract for trucks specifying "manufactured" trucks only, no "assembled" trucks would be considered.

One of the leading makers of assembled trucks, I think it was Stewart, got up a court case over this.

Their experts proved that engines from engine specialists like Lycoming or Continental were at least as good as anybody's and probably better.

Furthermore, because they were engine specialists and made so many thousands of engines they continuously sought improvements and incorporated those improvements at once.

Most car and truck makers could not do this. They could not afford to tear up their tooling and redesign their engines all the time and they did not have the research facilities in most cases.

Furthermore the truck assembler was not committed to a certain design. If some engine maker came out with a superior product he could easily change suppliers. A manufacturer with is own engine plant found his hands tied, again because it was too expensive to scrap an existing engine plant.

The same applied to brakes, steering, frames, in fact all the parts that went into the truck.

Even today the biggest trucks are assembled with Cummins engines, New Departure transmissions, frames and axles bought from outside suppliers in fact very little made by even the biggest manufacturers themselves except the cab.

Cadillac used Northway V8s and so did other makes, I forget the names though Cole comes to mind.

There were lots more V8 cars besides Cadillac. On a list of makes from 1922 I counted over 20 V8 cars between 1915 and 1922. At least half of them started using V8s the same year as Cadillac.

I remember Cadillac, Cole 8, Daniels, Austin, King, Cunningham, Peerless, no doubt there were others.

Interesting about the court case. Did assemblers win the argument then?

Guess there is good and bad -- good because of the reasons you mention and bad because you can buy a dozen trucks from X company and there might be 3 different engines in the bunch.

To the owner means stocking or finding parts for them all and maintenance not knowing what they're getting when coming in for work done. I know that's a big issue on the stuff I work on because of running changes and rev levels.

Friends


I remember reading a defense of assembled cars as collector cars. It pointed out that they were often easier to restore since the mechanical parts were shared with so many other makes. New engine parts are still available from Continental, for example. I guess this vindicates the plantiff in that court case.

The Elcar ( 1916-31) was the last name given to a string of carriage and motor car businesses of the Pratt brothers. The other names used were Pratt and Pratt_Elkhart. They started out manufacturing carriages and selling them 'direct", i.e. mail order. The highest production year was just under 1900 cars, which was less than Henry Ford was building on one day at about the same time. For a while a substantial portion of the production was taxi cabs

The Pratt brothers sold the company to former Auburn executives in 1921, which meant they didn't have to deal with the Depression....

Regards

John Harley

Elcar was sold in 1922 to a group from Auburn Indiana headed
by Flay B Sears.

John F. Shireman