The Hoffmann car has been called a driver-killing monster, an alien from a horror movie, a drunken cuttlefish, the worst of the worst… However, it is still on the road and has official registration, although in September it will celebrate its 85th anniversary.
It took only two years from the conception of the engineering solution and design to the actual realization of this creation. From 1949 to 1951, the owner of a small German workshop in Munich, Michael Hoffmann, made the legendary three-wheeled Hoffmann car.
You can’t deny the mechanic’s imagination; his creation looks like a real monster. However, one can mock and laugh at Hoffman, but one cannot deny him the flight of thought. To be fair, the mechanic was a decade ahead of his time. But not in the automotive industry. The master’s design was borrowed by aircraft designers who liked this configuration for the nose of wide-body passenger aircraft.
The frontal images of the upper half with the windows and roof of the car’s cabin are almost identical to the shapes of the upper frontal part of current airliners. The aircraft designers transferred what they saw on the Hoffmann car to the kulman and then made a prototype for the wind tunnel. It was exactly what we were looking for. The only thing is that Hoffman’s car has an asymmetrical windshield, while the proportions in the airplanes are balanced.
As for the car, it is both wide at the front and narrow at the back, and short in length. So on the move, he looked more like a drunk leaving a bar. History has never known such a shaky and unstable car in motion to this day.
First, there is a short triangular design for a three-wheeled car. It has a right to exist and is quite common. But if the car has an extended wheelbase, then it is quite stable in maneuvers. But the short three-wheeled base with a wide wheel set is unstable. It is stable only at pedestrian speed.
Experts believe that the biggest problem with the Hoffmann is not so much the design as the construction: the track width of the front wheel set is larger than the wheelbase itself. This makes the machine extremely unstable.
Add to that the moped engine on the rear steering wheel. There is a two-stroke engine with a volume of 200 cc. It is air-cooled and has a power output of 6.5 hp. A three-speed transmission with a linear shift pattern and a neutral position between reverse, first and second gears completes the package.
Moped power is enough to pull a 340-kilogram car at a top speed of 45 km/h. However, it is not recommended to reach more than 20 km/h even in a straight line – a shaky three-wheeler, whose width almost catches up with its length, can simply fall over on its side.
The suspension is such that even on a flat road it will shake you to the point of chattering. The car is both unstable and uncomfortable. Landing in it is also problematic. It’s also difficult to fill up the tank, which is located on the floor: the neck is on the roof, and the gasoline pipe stretches down through the cabin behind the seats, blocking the view through the rear windows.
This miraculous artwork was found and restored in a single copy. History is silent on its way to the United States, but the three-wheeled killer monster was restored in 1996 and exhibited at the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, thanks to the efforts of Gottfried Gerhose. He was responsible for updating it and preserving it in as much originality as possible, including ч. its asymmetrical windshield.
From time to time, the car is taken to car shows and exhibitions. But no one has been doing test drives for a long time – the car is old and can’t withstand the loads. The last time she was given a short “ride” eight years ago, a video of which (see below) was found.
Nothing like that happened after that. Given the advanced age of the worst of the worst cars in the global automotive industry, it is likely that such tests will no longer be possible. However, as a static museum exhibit, this car gives rise to human imagination and brings back the successful and not so successful pages of the history of automotive industry.
