Autocar Ltd cars for sale
About these listings
Every Autocar Ltd listed on MotorLoop.
Overview
Autocar is the oldest surviving motor vehicle brand in the Western Hemisphere, founded on 21 October 1897 and still building trucks today. It is worth knowing up front that this is a commercial-vehicle marque: modern Autocars are severe-duty vocational trucks — refuse collection, terminal tractors, concrete — not passenger cars. An Autocar in a classifieds listing is almost always a heavy vehicle.
The company built the first motor truck commercially available in the United States in 1899, a delivery wagon rated at a 700-pound payload with a choice of five or eight horsepower.
History
Louis Semple Clarke built Autocar No. 1, a single-cylinder tricycle now held by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and founded the Pittsburgh Motor Vehicle Company with his brothers, his father and a friend, William Morgan. The business moved to Ardmore, Pennsylvania in 1899 and took the Autocar name.
Several conventions of the modern car were first shipped by Autocar: the first left-hand-drive vehicle, the first circulating oil system and the first porcelain-insulated spark plug. More than 37,000 Autocar trucks were built for United States military service in the Second World War.
Passenger-car production ended long ago; the brand’s continuous thread from 1897 to now is the truck.