The first Tatra vehicle, a TL4 truck, was completed


Saturday 29th March 1919

The first Tatra vehicle, a TL4 truck, was completed. The truck was Tatra’s first offering to the automotive world but it was the Tatra car that had inspired engineer Hans Ledwinka to found Tatra. Just after the war, Hans Ledwinka began construction of a new automobile to be marketed under the marque Tatra, a division of the newly named Koprivnicka Wagenbau of Czechoslovakia. The Tatra High Mountains are among the highest in the Carpathian Mountain Range, the legendary home of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Ledwinka settled on the name Tatra in 1919, when an experimental model of his car with four-wheel brakes passed a sleigh on an icy mountain road, prompting the sleigh riders to exclaim, “This is a car for the Tatras.” In 1923, the first official Tatra automobile, the Tatra T11, was completed, and Ledwinka’s hope for an affordable “people’s car” was realized. The reliable, rugged T11, like Ford’s Model T, gave many Czechoslovakians their first opportunity to own an automobile. In 1934, Tatra achieved automotive press with the introduction of the Tatra 77, the world’s first aerodynamically styled automobile powered by a rear-mounted air-cooled engine.


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