By Jay Hirsch
Stery-Werke was founded in the town of Steyr, Austria. It produced armaments and bicycles and during WWI employed 14,000 people.
When WWI ended there was little demand for weapons and Steyr decided to go into the making of automobiles. In 1920 designer Hans Ledwinka, who would go on to design the Tatra, designed the first Steyr. The model made was the 120 with a six-cylinder engine.
Ledwinka later came into conflict with management when the company wanted to make luxury cars; he preferred a cheap, simple car, with a four-cylinder-air-cooled-engine called the Type IV. Management did not agree with him, so he quit. Ledwinka went on to create a car with the air-cooled flat twin design and joined Tatra, taking the design with him. The design and engine were influential for the first Volkswagen. Ferdinand Porsche, who had worked for Mercedes, joined the Steyr company in 1929 and helped in the engineering of cars. In 1934 Steyr merged with Austro-Daimler-Puch and became Stery Daimler Puch.
The year 1937 saw Steyr come out with a new OHV 2260 cc/2.3 liter engine and the new car model was named the 220. It was for the time period a sleek aero designed body and came in four body designs: a five-passenger sedan, a five-passenger cabriolet, and two specially made body cabriolets built by Glaser Coachworks of Dresden, Germany. One was a four-passenger convertible. The other was the very rare two-passenger 220 Cabriolet seen here, of which six were only made. “Cabriolet” is the French word for convertible. Steyr made 5,900 model 220s between 1937 and 1941.
The 220 convertible pictured was originally built as demonstration model for a Berlin car dealer. It has…
