This Has To Be One Of The First Cars To Deliberately Throw Shade At Another Car: Cold Start

Not too long ago, I was driving the 15th Shelby Cobra ever made around Willow Springs (there’s a video coming with lots more stuff than that so stay tuned) when I started thinking about cars that were named in direct response to another car. And the only example I could think of at the time was the DeTomaso Mangusta, named for the Italian word for mongoose, since a mongoose is an animal that eats cobras. As in the Cobra I was driving. So, not only was it a car named in response to another car, there was a bit of shade thrown. I think I found an earlier example of this, what may be the first example of this, period.

It’s also, I believe, one of the earliest examples of a gasoline/electric hybrid car, too. And it was designed by Ferdinand Porsche! All these things, in one car? How is it possible? Well, I guess it helps that it’s a pretty damn big car.

The car was the Lohner-Porsche Mixte, which means “mixed” in German and refers to the car’s hybrid nature, a mix of gasoline and electric power. The car, developed by Porsche when he worked at the Jacob Lohner Factory around the turn of the 20th century, was what we’d call a series hybrid today – meaning that the combustion motor just charges batteries, and doesn’t drive the wheels.

In this case, those wheels were moved by in-hub motors, which were revolutionary at the time. Porsche built smaller two-motor cars, where just the front wheels contained the hub motors and also four-motor systems, where all four wheels contained a hub motor, making these cars some of the earliest 4WD designs, too.

One of these cars, the first Mixte, was built in 1900 for E.W. Hart, a British coachbuilder who wanted to use it as a racecar. The Hart car was one of the four-motor designs, and contained almost two tons of batteries, 44 cells of lead-acid batteries making 80 volts to power the motors, and the whole set of batteries were slung in a spring-loaded housing, to help keep the easily-breakable batteries safe. This car required two Diamler 2.5-liter combustion motors to charge the batteries, and the whole thing was heavy as hell.

But we need to talk about the name of this car, because that’s the whole point of today’s Cold Start! It was called the La Toujours Contentes, which in French means “always content,” which was a direct play on (or insult or mockery or shade-throwing or something) the first car to break the mile-a-minute (60 mph) barrier, the electric sausage-torpedo-shaped Jamais Contente of Camille Jenatzy, which means, “never content” or “never satisfied.”

La Toujours Contentes was not capable of more than 37 mph or so, which means it was no match for the lighter and more nimble Jamais Contente in terms of speed, but I do admire the somewhat shit-starting name. I bet there’s some other cars named to acquire the goat of some other carmaker, but I’m pretty sure this was the first.