The story
History
Brütsch (1904–88) was the son of a successful Stuttgart stocking manufacturer. He raced motorcycles from 1929 to 1931 and cars from 1935 to 1950, some of them his own. His first vehicle was a half-scale Maserati for children, at DM 750.source 1 In 1951 came three prototypes, the Eremit, the 400 and the Zwerg: single-seat three-wheelers with two wheels at the front, engines of 77 to 125 cc, about 2 m (6 ft 7 in) long and about 100 kg (220 lb). The Eremit was shown at Frankfurt in 1951 at a proposed DM 2,000.source 1 A dealer paid a DM 2,000 deposit for an agency that October, and a court later ordered it repaid.source 2
Then he went the other way. The Brütsch 1200 was a sports cabriolet on the parts of a Ford Taunus 12M, with a body by the Lorcher Karosseriefabrik, at DM 10,500. A separate Brütsch company in Munich built and sold it from November 1953 to April 1954.source 1source 2
Plastic and paper
Most of Brütsch’s cars had glass-fibre bodies, and he claimed to have been first, in a formal reply that auto motor und sport printed.
„Das Fahrzeug ‚Brütsch 200 aus Plastik‘ ist auf dem deutschen Markt das erste Kleinfahrzeug mit Fiberglaskarosserie.“
The editors disputed it, with a reader’s photograph of an earlier one: the Brütsch 200, they said, had not been first. The same pages carried a less happy document. On 2 November 1954 a Stuttgart court had placed Brütsch’s assets under sequestration at his creditors’ request, and the sequestrator wrote to them in December that Brütsch had stopped all payments some time before. He proposed a settlement over two and a half years, which depended on finding licensees for the Brütsch 200.source 2
That car was the 200 Spatz, an open three-seat three-wheeler with a 200 cc Sachs engine; only three were built.source 1 Spatz-Fahrzeugbau, near Traunstein, paid DM 25,000 for the right to make it, but the car failed its German type approval, so the firm dropped the load-bearing plastic body and had Hans Ledwinka design a central-tube chassis for a four-wheeled version, the Spatz. Brütsch demanded licence fees on that too and attacked the makers in public; in 1956 Spatz won an interim injunction forbidding him to call himself its designer.source 3source 1 In Switzerland the three-wheeler was built as the Belcar.source 1
Small but fine
At the Frankfurt show in September 1955 Brütsch showed his Zwerg family: a single-seater with a 75 cc DKW engine and stepless drive at DM 1,475, and single- and two-seaters with a 200 cc Sachs at DM 1,775 and DM 1,975. The magazine found them lovely to look at and quite cleanly made.source 4 The same price list gives the Spatz at DM 2,975, or DM 3,175 as a coupé. Read one way, the magazine lists it among Brütsch’s cars; its report also has Spatz-Fahrzeugbau showing the Spatz itself, already rebuilt with four wheels.source 4
„In alter Treue wieder eingefunden hat sich hingegen Brütsch — klein, aber fein. Im Ernst!“
A year later, at the IFMA, he had the tiny Brütsch Mopetta, the four-wheeled Pfeil, the three-wheeled Bussard and a smaller Zwerg, now on central-tube frames rather than load-bearing plastic. His brochure offered the Pfeil with the engine of the Lloyd LP 400, though the magazine doubted that Lloyd had agreed. He was looking for licensees again, and a large foreign concern was said to have bitten; his earlier licensees had distanced themselves from him.source 3
„Man kann über ihn denken, wie man will, Ideen hat er jedenfalls.“
France, and the end
A licence for the Zwerg was sold to France at the end of 1954, and the car became the Avolette, built by Air-Tourist and then France-Jet. The Rollera was built under licence in France too, and the V2-N, a V2 with doors and a Fiat 500 engine, was developed for a French licensee who stopped after a year.source 1 In all, German Wikipedia’s counts come to about 75 cars built in Germany.source 1 In December 1956 auto motor und sport still called him tireless, a man who made beautiful plastic cars.source 5 His last car was a coupé prototype on a Ford Taunus 12M. Then he turned to prefabricated houses, among them spherical plastic ones, and took out several patents.source 1
He is remembered among the designers as much for the number of his cars as for any one of them, and for the way his ideas travelled: to Traunstein, to Switzerland and to Paris, under other people’s names.
