Happy Martin Luther King day, everyone! In honor of this holiday for this great man, we’ll be taking the day off. Well, the Americans that work for us are taking the day off, seeing as how it’s an American holiday and all that. So, we will have some articles going up today, primarily from our Commonwealth Nations colleagues, so please forgive the occasional superfluous “u” that they may try to slip into words like “color” or “unguent” or whatever.
Still, I can’t just leave you without any car content today, so with that in mind, and as a very, very minor tribute to Dr.King, let’s talk a bit about the long-gone King Motor Car Company.
Charles Brady King (no relation) was not just the founder of the King Motor Car company, but was also, incredibly, the first person to drive an automobile on the streets of Detroit, in 1896, which he drove along Woodward Avenue at a speed of 5 blistering miles per hour, making that, I suppose, the very first Woodward Dream Cruise.
That’s King’s first car, with King there on the right, tearing ass down the street back in 1896. There’s a story – I have no idea how verifiable – that Henry Ford chased after the car on a bicycle, and when I picture that I image Ford as a kid, a teenager maybe, but he would have been 33 at the time, which I think maybe detracts from the charm of the story just a little bit.
King worked for a number of local carmakers before starting his own company in 1911. The cars made by King were fairly advanced for the era, with engines from marine engine builder Gray Motors and a flywheel that acted as an oil pump.
One weird thing about King cars was that for a while at least, a big claim made in their ads was that the cars had less parts than an average automobile:
Allegedly, the King had only about 450 parts, while most cars of the era had about 1,500 parts. The general engineering of Kings seems pretty conventional, so I’m not really certain were all those parts savings came in to play? The only other carmaker I can think of that advertised based on the paucity of parts would probably be DKW:
Of course, the DKW had a two-stroke engine, which inherently has far fewer parts than a four-stroke. I’m still not sure of the parts-saving secrets of the King.
In 1914, King introduced cars with V8 engines, just a couple of months after Cadillac brought the first V8 engines to cars with their L-Head engine. Though, as you may not be surprised to find out, that milestone is disputed, as you can watch here, because why not:
King Motor Company seems to have suffered from expanding too quickly, and after filing for bankruptcy, being sold, moving to Buffalo, and related indignities, the company finally closed in 1923.
I hope you have a fantastic MLK day, and all of us American Autopians will be back tomorrow!
$1565 in 1913 is $50k today. So car prices haven’t changed all that much.
That guy riding wiht King looks suspiciously like Johnny Cab.
I know of at least one other. Think gigacastings and octovalves.
Can’t blame him for doing only 5mph: that’s basically a go cart with ~28” wagon wheels. And a tiller.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s cool—but you had to be tough to daily that year-round in Michigan. Not that different from a wagon, I guess
Where has Uncle Adrian gone lately? Surely he is only American in his mushy parts?
He checked in with us on the Discord. It’s his story to tell, but life outside The Autopian is the short version.
The longer version involves a fiery Italian in a red outfit.
Crap,I haven’t been on Discord for some time now. Hope he is doing at least semi-fine and that he’s back with us soon.
He’s not dead yet!
That’s good to hear. I always figured he was some some sort of coffin-dwelling undead being who came out at dark to spread his knowledge and British snarkiness.
“The only other carmaker I can think of that advertised based on the paucity of parts would probably be DKW”
Didn’t NSU and Mazda, particularly the latter, boast about their Wankel rotary engines having fewer parts than conventional engines in their advertising? However, those and DKW specified engine parts whereas it’s indeed not clear where King reduced their number of parts. For all one knows they could’ve reduced the number of bolts holding the seats in place from 105 bolts to 5 bolts so technically they used 100 fewer parts.
Saab made the same claim as DKW, as their engine was based on DKW’s, though I don’t recall whether it appeared in ads or in the other company literature. A 3-cylinder 2-stroke doesn’t have much in the way of engine parts. My folks had one, it came with a canvas tool roll that IIRC had a couple of screwdrivers and wrenches and maybe a hammer. I’ve still got the adjustable wrench, which is about halfway between a monkey wrench and a crescent wrench.
EVs are often described as having “fewer moving parts” which may be true if you pick you EV and ICE vehicle carefully and are willing to count many parts fixed together in an assembly as a single part.
Dunno if any of them have actually used that claim in an advertisement.
Some EVs probably have more moving parts if you factor in things like electric door handle motors/solenoids and heat pumps.
They certainly have more actual parts if you include the thousands of parts that make up the battery pack.
So a long stroke motor, was it a single cylinder thumper and 1 speed transmission? Look at all the parts we saved! For reverse you have to get out and push, but fewer parts!
“With King there on the right…”
I know Jason means on the right of the picture, but I wonder if he means on the right side of the car? An example of how language can be confusing.
And, is there a “driver side” of this car?
If the lever on the car’s left is a control, then the driver has to sit on the left, making it LHD.
You know, until I read your comment, I thought King was the guy in the right seat (which didn’t make much sense to me as that fellow doesn’t seem to be very engaged with this whole Cruising Woodward thing)
Less parts?……. FEWER…. Fewer parts
Thank you.
To be fair to Jason the advert says “less”, which since it’s sort of a quote makes it perhaps marginally less inexcusable.
And the ad gets it right in the first bullet point, which probably wasn’t called a bullet point at the time and certainly lacks any bullet-like graphic to set it off. I guess that makes it a “bold point” instead, although not necessarily a bold claim, albeit the intent seems to be to portray it as if it is.
I’m drifting off onto the shoulder now. so I’ll stop.
Unless they really meant “1000 lesser parts”. Maybe that’s the secret. They had the same number of parts, but many were of lower quality.
The Onion Knight’s grammar lessons have taken hold!
There’s also the King Midget, another story….
The Youtube video topshot is pretty amazing. I need to watch that video tonight.