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!
The post Happy MLK Day! We’re (Mostly) Off Today, But Here’s A Car Called King appeared first on The Autopian.
