1926 Stutz sedan
Object Details
- Stutz Motor Car Company
- Description
- The 1926 Stutz sedan introduced two trends in American automobile design: longer, lower cars, and safety features built into the body. The redesigned "Safety Stutz" was noticeably lower than "high hat" sedans of the 1910s and early 1920s. Its safety features included a low center of gravity, which helped prevent skidding, swaying, and tipping over; a wire-glass windshield, an early effort toward shatter-resistant glass; narrow front corner posts for better visibility; and reinforced runningboard side bumpers. The body sat low on the chassis because a worm-gear differential made it possible to place the drive shaft below the rear axle. Some new-car showrooms featured a 1926 Stutz mounted at a 45-degree angle to show how far the safety car could lean without tipping over. Stutz sales literature extolled the car's "road-adhesiveness" and compared it to "a strong magnetic attraction exerted by the earth upon the car's wheels."
- The worm-gear differential used in the Stutz automobile was not widely adopted by car manufacturers, but the lengthening and lowering of sedans continued for decades and had a great impact on styling, manufacturing, and sales. Safety glass became common in the late 1920s and 1930s, but wire glass was replaced by two-layer glass with consolidating material between the layers.
- Eugene Fatjo purchased this car in 1926; he lived in Santa Clara, California, and worked at the Bank of America. Fatjo's granddaughters, Katherine F. Harrington and Candace M. Harrington, donated the Stutz to the Smithsonian in 1994.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Credit Line
- Gift of Katherine F. Harrington and Candace M. Harrington
- 1926
- ID Number
- 1994.0278.01
- accession number
- 1994.0278
- catalog number
- 1994.0278.01
- Object Name
- automobile
- Measurements
- overall: 6 ft x 5 1/2 ft x 16 1/4 ft; 1.8288 m x 1.6764 m x 4.953 m
- place made
- United States: Indiana, Indianapolis
- See more items in
- Work and Industry: Transportation, Road
- Automobiles
- Transportation
- Road Transportation
- National Museum of American History
- Record ID
- nmah_1297417
- Metadata Usage (text)
- CC0
- GUID (Link to Original Record)
- https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746ab-d2cc-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa
