One sunny afternoon in the third week of September 2007, I arrived at my hotel near the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main railway station) after a train ride from the airport; a long flight from Toronto, and a cab ride from home. I’d given myself a couple of extra days in advance so I’d have a fighting(!) chance at being awake for the International Symposium on Automotive Lighting in nearby Darmstadt, but giving in to sleep would have spoiled that plan by severely prolonging and aggravating the jetlag.
I dropped my baggage at the hotel and went out walking in Wiesenhüttenstraße (“Meadow Huts Road” sounds a whole lot less hilarious). So stoned on sleep deprivation was I, with my brain constantly popping out of gear and giggly mirth over things like the street name and the van with MIETWAGEN spelt out in big block letters (it means “rentcar”, but looks like “meat wagon”—German is inherently funny), that it took me a moment to reckon out whether I was hallucinating this car.
It was real, I’m pretty sure. I think there was some kind of event being festivated; I don’t recall the particulars, but the car was part of it. No cordons or anything—evidently Frankfurters, even in the medium-sketchy railway station district, could be trusted to behave themselves in accord with all applicable DIN standards. So I stepped up and took a few pictures.
I don’t often get to scrutinise a car I know absolutely nothing about. Usually there’s at least some shred, even if it’s just some bit of trivia about some aspect of its lighting system, but this? Nope, not a thing; I was just completely blank about it. That’s still the case, pretty much, but I do know those amber front Blinker (turn signals) are a much later retrofitment.
This, Damen und Herren, is a hood ornament.
And this is a Scheinwerfer, I mean headlamp. I guess I wasn’t quite completely out of my mind, for something caught my attention about it.
Specifically, this logo on the lens. The famous, iconic car-lights kitty cats belonged to Marchal; “cats” plural because there were several versions of the Marchal kitty cat before the corporate owner of that fabled brand carelessly threw away its many decades’ worth of brand equity. But this is not one of the Marchal kitty cats; it’s an ersatz-Katze (see? German is funny). Besides, Marchal was an extremely French brand, and this is an extremely unFrench car. I think, and image-searching suggests, it’s much more likely this car would’ve come with lamps from Bosch or Hella or one of those. Also, I have a weak recollection of seeing this kitty cat on another generic/unbranded/imitation headlamp, maybe.
I don’t remember why I didn’t take any pics of the back of the car, but I didn’t. I found this pic of the same car on Wikipedia, though, so I guess that means it was at least mostly real after all:
What a pleasant surprise! I remember seeing these on the streets in Innsbruck, although looking pretty old and battered, having survived 20 years and WW2.
These are from an era when cars were designed for local Austrian conditions. It had a four speed transmission, with gear ratios that allowed it to climb the steepest Alpine passes. Its four wheel independent suspension (swing axles on the rear) gave it excellent adhesion and comfort over the roughest roads, and non-roads. The 1.5 L four was tuned for a wide powerband.
Steyr cars, trucks,and tractors all had a reputation for being very well built and long-lived. Steyr-Puch managed to keep building the little Fiat 500 bodied cars (but with unique suspension, brakes, engines, transmissions, etc.) into the early 70s. Now it is of course a contract builder owned by Magna.
There’s quite a bit of history of the marque in my CC here:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-european/curbside-classic-steyr-puch-500-a-small-but-grand-end-to-austrias-automobile-industry/
I knew you wouldn’t waste any time putting in your 2 groschen.
Ah…Symposiums…besides the accommodations, open bar, killer food, and cheap meaningless sex, the content is usually worthless. However, I attended many in my 28 years in the marine industry, for reasons stated above.
It’s interesting how you brought up jet-lag and your efforts to combat it. I keep a residence in the Philippines, so I have gone back and forth dozens of times over the years.
I have read and tried every anti-jet-lag remedy there is. I have tried not to sleep on the plane, I have tried to say awake and go to bed a somewhat normal hour, I’ve tried melatonin and other methods I can’t remember.
None of them worked. For me, going east is a lot harder than going west. When I fly to Manila, I arrive at about 7:00 PM local time. I stay up until midnightish and go to bed. After about two days I am fine. Coming back is a different story. I leave at 2:00 PM Manila time and, after a thirteen hour flight, arrive in Vancouver at 10:00 AM, which really messes up my body clock. Sometimes I adjust almost immediately, sometimes it takes a week. There is not rhyme nor reason. I just sleep when I am tired.
Jetlag stories, oh, I’ve got jetlag stories. One time I was hauling my suitcase from the train to my hotel in Geneva, and I trudged past the brewery where some other attendees of the upcoming UN vehicle lighting standards development meeting were sitting. They were at a patio table with five litres of beer in the middle, contained in a tall, clear plastic column with a spigot near the bottom. They beckoned me to join them. I begged off on excuse of jetlag.
One of them renewed the beckon and said beer cures jetlag. Well…h’mm. This guy is originally from Poland, where they’re reputed to know one or two things about drinking. And he travels a whole lot more than I do, to meetings where he has to be awake right from the start. And given the p’ticular cast of characters, it might well be politically preferable to avoid seeming standoffish. Plus, this was shaping up as the one (1) instance in my entire whole life when I actually experienced peer pressure to drink alcohol, so I told ’em I’d go park my luggage—the hotel was a few doors down from the brewery—and be right back.
I changed out of my flight clothes, went back to the brewery, and had a beer or two, carefully—the main reason I don’t drink, aside from not particularly liking it, is that nobody needs my mouth getting any bigger than it already is.
I’ll be dingbangled: I slept right through the night—a first on a trip such as this—and I was in much better shape the next morning than ever previously. The Polish guy was right.
And I had some real gems to compare the experience to. The first time I’d gone to a vehicle lighting symposium in Europe (it was the French one which alternates years with the German one) I got walloped hard. I was for-real hallucinating right there in the lecture hall, stuck on the cusp of dreaming; the speaker was down there in colourful jester regalia and going off into rhetorical ponds far, far off topic—not really, but it surely seemed real to me.
None of that happened when I used the guy’s beer trick. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Great find Daniel. Appreciate the nice extra artistry in the headlights and hood ornament. Adds so much additional character.
I like the tiny spider climbing the hood ornament.
Zonk. I’ve been looking at this picture intermittently for the last decade-and-half, and didn’t see that until you just pointed it out.
So was this car registered in Austria with a special antique or personalized license plate?
Apparently so.
Great stuff, never a Steyr this old before.
When Mrs DougD was on her post university backpacking trip across Europe, she thought that Einbahnstraße meant “This way to the castle” so she spent a fun hour following one way streets all over town.
And the Burgstraße turned out to be an Einbahnstraße after all?
That’s some find Daniel. I’m certain I never saw a Steyr passenger car, plenty of trucks (Haflinger and Pinzgauer included) and farm tractors though. High quality, indeed, and excellent off-road capabilities for anything AWD.
Seem to recall seeing one of these in an “All Creatures Great & Small” episode. Don’t think it was red/black though. H’mm
Extremely unlikely. The odds of a Steyr ending up in GB back then were next to nil. never mind the RHD. There were British cars that looked somewhat similar.
All Creatures Great and Small used Austin 7s and a Rover in the original, and a Vauxhall in the 2020 remake.
And Paul’s correct to highlight styling similarity – the front of this is a bit Morris 8 (or vice-versa).
Such an elegantly proportioned car. That two tone paint with just enough chrome to tempt the eyes. That Marchal cat is rather clever and reminds me of the easter eggs current manufactures work into designs.
…but it’s not a Marchal cat.
Looks sort of like a Lancia Aprilia, but lower built.
Twin spares – tyre stores few and far between up those mountains? 🙂
I recall that some of the big prewar Tatras also had dual spares; maybe this was an “formerly Austro Hungarian Empire” practice. It is an interesting looking car.
I have a feeling I saw this car at a local car meet years ago. Am impressed he made all the way from Vienna to Frankfurt. He most likely took the federal roads and not the Autobahn, these are not comfortable cruising at higher than 55 MPH.
I get so tired of people saying the German language is ‘funny’, just because when you want to leave a busy section of the Autobahn you have to squeeze off an Ausfahrt.
It’s really not…haha…no really, it’s not at all…hahahahaha…oh never mind.