Fiat manufacture in the USA (Zero Alfa content)

[JHertzman@domain.elided]

On the topic of European cars manufactured elsewhere, Biba mentioned seeing a 
1913 Fiat built here, Paul Rollins added that the factory was in 
Poughkeepsie, NY, and Matt Needham, who had done documentary drawings of the 
building, said he thought it had been built in 1914. Biba's account ("why 
doesn't Fiat build cars in the US once again?") implicitly assumed Fiat had 
built the car, and Rollins commented on Fiat currently having the most 
negative brand value in the U.S. of the several Fiat brands.

Fiat of Italy did not build the American Fiats; the Fiat Motor Company of was 
an American corporation, backed by a New York diamond importer, which had a 
license agreement with FIAT of Turin permitting them to manufacture any 
current FIAT model as well as to import types whose sales volumes did not 
warrant local production. The senior management was recruited from 
Pope-Toledo, Lozier, and Thomas. The company started up just as the golden 
days of the luxurious foreign car were coming to an end; I have a beautiful 
Pierce-Arrow advertisement, a lithograph of "the Pierce Arrow at the Aviation 
Meet", in which the entire text is "No one thing has done so much to decrease 
the number of imported cars as the Pierce Arrow." The Pierce was a six 
cylinder, as were Packard, Simplex, and Locomobile, and didn't cost much more 
than a well-built upper-middle-class house, while most of the imports were 
fours and cost considerably more.

I don't have the date of founding, but the company had finished cars on the 
road before the end of 1910. The 1914 date for the building may well be 
correct, as they could have been expanding from their start-up in another 
building. In February of 1918 the factory was sold to Duesenberg for the 
production of Bugatti-King aircraft engines, originally developed by Bugatti 
but considerably developed here by Charles B. King. 

The Bugatti engine was a U-16, or probably more correctly an II-16, as it had 
two banks of eight cylinders but also had two crankshafts geared to the 
propeller drive with provision for a cannon firing through the hub. After the 
war it was further developed by Breguet with two engines nose-to-nose as the 
power plant for a new aircraft, the "Leviathan", which also was not a success.

At the time that the Fiat company in the USA was founded Italy sold almost as 
many cars (dollar sales volume, not necessarily units) in the USA as England 
and Germany combined; most of the Italians would have been Fiats, although 
there would have been some Isotta-Fraschinis, made by Milan's only 
established car maker. France, however, sold more cars here than Italy, 
Germany, England, Belgium, and Switzerland combined. In a slightly earlier 
"Handbook of Gasoline Automobiles", published by the Association of Licensed 
Automobile Manufacturers, England, Italy and Germany were represented by one 
make each (Daimler, Fiat, and Mercedes) while France was represented by 
Charon-Girardot,.Clement-Bayard, Darracq, Decauville, De Dietrich, De Leon, 
Hotchkiss, Panhard-Levassor, Renault, and Rochet-Schneider. The actual number 
of cars imported was not great- in 1908 266 Renaults, 181 Fiats, 94 Mercedes, 
68 Panhards. By the end of the war all had changed; the wealthy were 
generally content to drive American cars, and the imports could not compete 
at either the low end or the high end of the market, with the exceprtion of  
a few nouveau riche - Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino - who affected Hissos 
and Isottas, a few anglophiles who favored Rolls, and the occasional 
non-conformist who might buy a Minerva or other odd choice. 

John H.

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