EHRHARDT / GERMANY

EHRHARDT / Zella St. Blasii / Germany  ( 1903 - 1922 )

The summer is gone and I have more time and leisure to work on the computer again. 

And this post is about an extremely rare car brand that has been completely forgotten even in its home country of Germany. 

The company built good quality vehicles, but they were never particularly advanced. In this respect, it is remarkable that EHRHARDT was probably the first German vehicle manufacturer to offer a four-wheel brake as early as 1913.

Even in active times vehicles of this company had never been widely used. And so it is not surprising that I have never seen an original radiator emblem and until recently it was also unclear whether there had been a radiator emblem at all.

But then Michael Schlenger published a black and white picture on his remarkable website (www.vorkriegs-klassiker-rundschau.blog  ), which shows an emblem on top of the radiator.

 

picture from    https://vorkriegs-klassiker-rundschau.blog/tag/ehrhardt/

 

 

close up of the radiator with emblem

 

 And as luck would have it, I was recently in a Swedish automobile museum, where there is a large exhibition of painted radiator emblems. The painter of these emblems was a Swedish boy, then 14 years old, who lived near the port city of Helsingborg. Beginning with the year 1924, he waited there for the arriving and departing automobiles and drew their radiator emblems.  This became a real passion, and in total he drew emblems from around 800 different car brands, because the variety of manufacturers was much greater then than it is today, even though there were far fewer vehicles on the road.

 

 

radiator emblem painted by Gustav Moeller in 1924

1920 picture of the EHRHARDT published in Automobil- und Flugverkehr

contemporary EHRHARDT advertisment

In 1922 Ehrhardt sold his company to the confectionery manufacturer Kanold (brand "SAROTTI"), who had also bought the carrosserie company "SZABO & WECHSELMANN".  The vehicles then still manufactured in Berlin until 1924 bore the name "EHRHARDT - SZAWE".

For more information about SZAWE click here !

1924 EHRHARDT - SZAWE advertisment

For more emblems see older posts or top right ( list of car makers ).

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