German ‘American’ identified
Dear Classic American,
Just leafing through the latest issue and saw the mystery car on page 22. You’re half right, it is a Borgward, but not an Isabella, which was smaller, but The Big Six, which was launched near the collapse of the Borgward Group. A rare car when new, even rarer now. Sorry to be pedantic! Anonymous
Via email
Dear Classic American,
The mystery motor featured on page 22 is certainly a Borgward, but not an Isabella. It’s one of its flagship six-cylinder P100s (also referred to as the 2.3-litre, at least in the 1960 Observer’s Book of Automobiles), produced only between January 1960 and July 1961, when Borgward was declared bankrupt after only 2500 examples of this model had been built. So, this is a rare survivor indeed. Not American, then – but, by way of a postscript, the tooling for this model was later shipped to Mexico, where it enjoyed an afterlife in the same way as the 1951-55 Kaiser in Argentina and the Aero-Willys in Brazil; it was manufactured by Ramirez in Monterrey between 1967 and 1970, with a further 2000 examples built (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Borgward_P100).
Tim Adams
Liverpool
Dear Classic American,
That Borgward would have fooled me for a while too but it’s not an Isabella, rather the much larger and short-lived P100 which only ran for about 18 months until the marque’s demise in 1961. Unfortunately for Borgward, its introduction coincided with that of the Mercedes W111 ‘fin tail’ range (220SE etc), which easily outsold it. Technically and pricewise there was not much in it, but the Merc was probably the better overall package; the P100 had excellent air suspension. But how nice to see a rather scruffy right-hand-drive example still in use; very few can have been sold in Britain.
Anthony Richards
Via email
We knew our eagle-eyed readers would know what this weird and wonderful vehicle was and even throw in a bit of potted history.