by Ross Finlay (06 Feb 00)

Yes, the car pictured here is a splendid 1924 Hispano-Suiza H6B, complete with the company's famous stork mascot on the radiator cap. But it might have been a Skoda, with the same mascot in the same place.

The Czech manufacturer, so often thought of as being, before the Volkswagen takeover, a purveyor of cheap economy cars, actually took the Hispano route into the motor industry in the first place.

In its early days, Skoda was a massive engineering combine. It built railway locomotives and had a huge armaments business, once commissioning Ferdinand Porsche, then at Austro-Daimler, to build a transporter for its 80-ton World War I siege mortar.

He came up with the C-Zug, whose 20-litre engine drove a dynamo which powered electric hub motors on a 16-wheel trailer able to move either by road or, after a quick re-jig, by rail.

In 1923 Skoda began building another heavyweight vehicle, this time a Czech version of the Sentinel steam lorry, under licence from the Sentinel Waggon Works of Shrewsbury.

But cars? Skoda went into volume production by taking over, in 1925, the existing car manufacturer Laurin & Klement, whose name it has used in recent years for special edition models.

However, it had also made a separate move to build Hispano-Suizas under licence from the French factory of that originally Spanish-Swiss firm. The model selected was the H6B, and although the first examples Skoda produced in 1925 were assembled from parts supplied from France, it was soon building the components itself.

More than 500 workers, in two shifts, operated the Hispano line, although Skoda built only the chassis. There were several fine coachbuilders in Czechoslovakia at the time, delighted to be connected with a car which accounted for most of the sales in the very small luxury sector of the Czech market.

It was certainly appreciated in the highest circles. The first Skoda-Hispano-Suiza went to President Masaryk. Coachbuilders produced limousine, dual limousine and cabriolet bodies, and more than 150 cars were built, before production petered out in 1929 as the Depression struck.

Skoda continued to build smaller models, of course, but it never renewed the Hispano-Suiza connection. All the same, it's intriguing to think that there were once top-class luxury cars displaying both the flying stork mascot of Hispano-Suiza and the winged arrow badge still used on Skodas today.

The connection with the political establshment has been revived. Skoda has produced a limited number of Octavia limousines, with a long wheelbase created by building an extension into the B-pillar. They are supplied to government departments in Prague.

Of course, the present-day Skoda company has just two shareholders: Volkswagen and the Czech Republic government.

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