Automobiles Hotchkiss
Hotchkiss went through a number of mergers and takeovers after the war and the brand disappeared in the 1970s; its successor companies went on to eventually form the partially state-owned Thales Group.
After an attempt to enter the luxury market with the AK, which did not get beyond the prototype stage, the company decided on a one model policy and introduced the Coventry designed AM in 1923.
Henry Mann Ainsworth (1884[1]–1971) and Alfred Herbert Wilde (1889 - 1930),[2] who had run it, moved to Paris to become general manager and chief engineer of the car division respectively.
The 1936 686, which replaced the 620, was available as the high-performance Grand Sport and 1937 Paris-Nice with twin carburettors and these allowed Hotchkiss to win the Monte Carlo Rally in 1932, 1933, 1934, 1939, 1949 and 1950.
[3] There was a disorderly evacuation, initially towards Auxerre and then Moulins and then further towards the south, as employees desperately tried to keep information on the military production out of the hands of the Germans.
[3] However, the national capitulation implicit in the signing of the armistice on 22 June left these efforts looking somewhat irrelevant, and most of the employees drifted back in the ensuing weeks.
[3] In 1941 François Lehideux, then a leading member of the government's economic team, called Jean-Pierre Peugeot and his General Director Maurice Jordan to a meeting, and invited them to study the possibility of taking a controlling share in the Hotchkiss business.
[3] The suggestion from Lehideux derived from a German law dated 18 October 1940 authorising the confiscation of businesses controlled by Jews.
[3] There is no evidence of any attempt to combine the operations of the two businesses, however: after the war Peugeot would in due course relinquish their holding in Hotchkiss.
[4] This volume of output was wholly insufficient to carry the company, although truck production was a little more successful with more than 2,300 produced in 1948,[4] and it was support from the truck volumes and from the Jeep based M201 that enabled the company to stagger on as a car producer slightly more convincingly than some of France's other luxury car makers, at least until the mid-1950s.
[6] Sales in general were falling, and on reaching his 65th birthday in 1949 Ainsworth retired, to be succeeded in the top job by Maurice de Gary.
The Grégoire design had integral construction, independent suspension all round, a 2.2 Litre flat-four engine and front wheel drive.
[8] Hotchkiss built its first truck in 1936, equipped with the 2,312 cc overhead-valve four-cylinder engine familiar from the 486 passenger car.
[9] Called the 486 PL (PLL in the case of the long wheelbase model), 163 examples had been built by the time production was halted in June 1940 due to the outbreak of war.
The 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine was retained, producing 60 hp (44 kW) at 3,000 rpm; this successful model also benefitted from hydraulic brakes.
[10][13] The more powerful DH50 used a 3,153 cc (192.4 cu in) four-cylinder engine from Perkins (whose French plant was also in Saint-Denis), the 4.192, producing 60 hp (44 kW).
[14] In 1951, Hotchkiss formed a joint venture with the Standard Motor Company to manufacture the Ferguson TE20 tractor in the Saint-Denis plant.
Standard was also in negotiations for purchasing the Hotchkiss plant outright, with an eye to building the Triumph Herald in Paris, but the deal fell through.
Massey-Ferguson chose to build a new plant in Beauvais, north of Paris, for their next generation of tractors, and thus the Standard connection came to an end.
The provision of spare parts for the M201 Jeep was picked up by Hotchkiss' erstwhile subsidiary Sofia ("(la Société Financière Industrie et Automobile"), while the petrol truck engine manufacturing line was transferred to Berliet.
