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.
Damn the torpedoes!
“I was driving the 15th Shelby Cobra ever made around Willow Springs”
You lucky glorious bastard, thought I had interesting career perks!
You chose wisely!
Got it.
Jamais Content (never content) happens twice as fast as
Toujours Contentes (always content)
Got to be some kind of hidden sexual joke in there somewhere I reckon.
This site has so much interesting content.
It might be apocryphal, and it’s definitely nonsense, but it sounds like GM pitched the Camaro name as in response to the Mustang, even if it wasn’t.
Also, where do we stand on anything that got renamed in response to something else (IE, Porsche 901 becoming 911 because of Peugeot’s lawyers)?
Story I heard..or remember reading is the Chevy said that Camaro was French word for “friend”. Fact check me if you will. I am getting some timers! Lol
Conceptually, it’s just amazing that this existed in 1900. Obviously the execution was constrained by the technology of the time, but wow.
I much prefer the spiteful or bitter “I’ll show you” or just a “fuck you” vehicle:
Ferrari (raison d’etre due to Alfa)
Lamborghini (raison d’etre due to Ferrari)
Ford’s GT (Ferrari)
Honda’s RC51 (Ducati)
It seems those Italians really piss people off.
In terms of other shade throwing car names there’s also the Toyota iQ (smart) and Ram 1500 TRX (Raptor).
I’d buy an iQ.
Get the Aston Martin version! The Cygnet. Aka swan.
With bikes there is Hayabusa (Blackbird).
What is that throwing shade at?
Honda Blackbird CBR1100XX
Great examples, think the TRX even has a relief of a t-rex chasing a velociraptor in it’s console.
If only Calvin pissing on another brand’s logo stickers had existed in 1900…
It’s amazing to me that the first car to break 60mph was electric. There’s an alternate universe out there where EVs were developed more than ICE cars, just think about how much more advanced we would be had people not given up on EVs 100 years ago.
How much nicer would our homes be if the Roman Empire hadn’t collapsed taking under-floor heating and baths with them 1600 years ago?
I don’t even have under-floor heating now.
True. That’s been on the list for things I want when I redo the next kitchen or bathroom for years. And I have redone several bathrooms and kitchens in that time but it’s always been too expensive to actually follow through and put it in. Next time.
I love me some Roman engineering, but have to keep reminding myself that much of their economy was heavily based on the labor of non-free people.
-dealt with a remote-furnace hydronic heating system years ago that required feeding right before bed—and you best not sleep in on a cold morning or your toes would curl up when they hit that cold floor!
Our homes would be dark, full of sewer gas, vermin, and lead pipes, and collapse all the time for seemingly no reason?
The slaves that used to have to run those systems would have eventually unionized after being set free and complained that the modern floor-heating systems were taking their jobs. They’d lobby to get laws put into place that require some guy from Floor Heater Local 562 come by twice a day to flip a switch on your house/business.
And the Romans would respond by sending in half the army to redecorate the roads into Rome with miles of unionized crucifixes.The other half would collect fresh non union meat from Gaul, Africa, Germania and Britian then parade it down those same roads as an anti union warning or, better yet, advice to just stay a slave.
Who knows. We would have just traded one big problem for another and the common man wouldn’t have had access at least early-on due to the cost to build EVs. Also – computing power is just as big a factor as the battery chemistry in making EVs work well. Interesting thought exercise…
Very true.
Imagine a world where EV’s had caught on first. Try to explain to the person of today in that timeline that instead of being able to conveniently just plug in your vehicle every night and it was ready to go the next day you had to drive to a special location to fill up your vehicle with a smelly, combustible, liquid that could get on your hands and clothes and sometimes you might even have to wait in a line to do it. They would think you were insane.
Haha yeah. That alternate universe probably has the tech to view ours and it’s explicitly banned for any of them to come here because they are too afraid of bringing us out of the stone age.
“A combustion engine, like an RC car? That would never work because I don’t have a way to re-fill with gas at home and there aren’t any re-fuelling stations near me. Also I hear that they catch fire and our firefighters don’t have the equipment for gas spills.”