Concept Car That Never Made It - Schlorwagen
If you look at a list of cars organised by drag coefficient, your eye will wander immediately to cars most efficient at cutting through air.You’ll see a lot of concept cars, mostly from the latter parts of the twentieth century and the first parts of the twenty-first.
Spoiler alert: the Ecorunner VI wins, with a drag coefficient of 0.048 (lower being better). If you’re attentive enough, you might catch that a car built in 1939 is mixing it up with the best of them, registering a drag coefficient of 0.15. That, friends, is the Schlörwagen.
But what is the Schlörwagen? It’s a rear-engine car that seats seven, built on a Mercedes 170 H chassis. Things get wild from there: creator Karl Schlör drew inspiration for the body from aeronautic structures. Wings, in other words. Schlör encased the vehicle in a teardrop aluminium frame that presaged a lot of modern aerodynamic innovations. Because the wheels were encased in the body, this also meant the contraption was 2.7 metres wide and 4.33 metres long.
The Mercedes it was built on had a top speed of 105 kilometres per hour. The Schlörwagen, on the other hand, ripped around a track at a maximum of 136. This, despite the fact speed wasn’t the design’s primary goal: it was designed to be a family car with low fuel consumption. In this regard, it succeeded, consuming just eight litres of fuel per 100 kilometres – 20–40% less than the Mercedes.
The tradeoff – and it’s a big one – is that the Schlörwagen was apt to be buffeted off the road by a strong crosswind. This probably played a part in the car never making it to production.
After the so-nicknamed ‘Göttingen Egg’ debuted at the 1939 International Motor Show in Berlin, it was hidden away while World War II raged around it. Until – and for no reason we can discern outside of it being fun – a 130-horsepower Russian M-11 aircraft engine was attached to its rear and the resulting mongrel put through its paces on a Göttingen track.
Though there are a lot of theories, the whereabouts of the sole Schlörwagen produced remain unknown. It is presumed scrapped and lost to time.
Related: Concept Car That Never Made It - Frisky Family Three
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