Hupmobile

• 1. Introduction

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  Hupmobile was once the car that helped launch Greyhound, hosted the birth of the National Football League, and pushed the entire auto industry toward all-steel bodies. In 1909, Bobby Hupp co-founded the Hupp Motor Car Company in Detroit with just $8,500 in startup money from his partner Charles Hastings, formerly of Oldsmobile. Within a single model year, the company had sold 500 vehicles. Within two more, it had sold over 5,000. The questions worth asking are: how did a small Detroit upstart become a genuine rival to Ford and Chevrolet, and what series of decisions turned that promise into a company that ceased production after building just 319 of its final model?

• 2. A Standing Start

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  Bobby Hupp secured $25,000 in cash deposits at the 1909 automobile show before a single car had rolled off his line. That figure was the lowest capitalization among Detroit's eight major carmakers at the time. The first vehicles were assembled in a small building at 345 Bellevue Avenue in Detroit. The address would later be renumbered 1161. The company outgrew that space almost immediately and began construction of a factory a few blocks away at East Jefferson Avenue and Concord, next to the old Oldsmobile plant.

  The founding team was a deliberate assembly of automotive experience. Emil Nelson, who had come from both Oldsmobile and Packard, joined as chief engineer. Hastings was named assistant general manager. Investors J. Walter Drake, Joseph Drake, John Baker, and Edwin Denby provided capital. Drake became president; Hupp held the roles of vice president and general manager. By late 1909 Bobby's brother, Louis Gorham Hupp, had left his job with the Michigan Central Railroad in Grand Rapids to join the enterprise as well.

  The car they built, the Model 20, was priced at $900 and offered a practical but modest package. Its four-cylinder engine was rated at 16 to 20 horsepower and was lubricated by a Hupp-designed system that carried enough oil for a 250-to-300-mile trip. The transmission offered only two speeds with widely spaced ratios. The reverse gear used the same ratio as low gear, which meant the car moved quite fast when backing up. Despite these limitations, Hupp sold 500 vehicles by the fall of 1909, then more than 5,000 in the 1910 model year.

• 3. Steel Revolution

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  In 1911, Nelson set out to do something almost no one in the American auto industry had attempted. He approached Hale and Kilburn Company in Philadelphia about building an entirely metal body for the new Hupp 32. Hale and Kilburn had already pioneered the use of pressed steel in railway carriage interiors, replacing cast iron. Nelson later explained that none of the Detroit plants would agree to make an all-steel body for the car.

  At Hale and Kilburn, Nelson found two men ready to take on the challenge: Edward Budd, the company's general manager, and Joseph Ledwinka, an engineer. Budd saw the Hupp project as an opportunity for something larger than a single contract. Together, Budd and Ledwinka worked with Nelson to design a production method where numerous steel stampings were welded by hand and held in position by a system of angle iron supports. The finished subassemblies were shipped by rail to Detroit, then reassembled, painted, and trimmed at the Hupmobile factory. The process was used to build not only touring cars and coupes but even one Hupmobile limousine.

  Critically, in 1911 none of the three men thought to patent what they had invented. Budd and Ledwinka later left Hale and Kilburn to form the Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Company. In 1914, Ledwinka filed for and received a patent on the all-steel body process. Budd then used that patent to sue the C.R. Wilson Body Company for infringement. The court rejected the claim, ruling that the Ledwinka patent was invalid because the process had already entered the public domain. The court pointed directly to the production of the Hupp 32 in 1911 as a primary example of prior art. By pioneering all-steel bodies and then failing to protect the method, Hupmobile had, in effect, given the technology to the world. Nelson resigned as chief engineer in 1912, and Hupmobile's commitment to all-steel construction did not survive his departure.

• 4. Growth and Overreach

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  After Bobby Hupp left the company in 1913, Hupp Motor Car Company kept expanding. Hupp competed directly against Ford and Chevrolet, and by 1928 annual sales had reached over 65,000 units. That year, to handle continued sales growth, Hupp purchased the Chandler-Cleveland Motors Corporation for its manufacturing facilities. DuBois Young, who became president in 1924 after advancing from vice president of manufacturing, led the company through much of this expansion.

  The seeds of decline were planted before sales peaked. Starting in 1925, Hupp introduced an 8-cylinder model and then eliminated the 4-cylinder Hupmobile entirely after that year. The company had built only 4-cylinder cars from 1909 through 1925. Chasing a more lucrative market segment, Hupp turned away from the customers who had made the brand. The same error was made by many other medium-priced carmakers in the same period. In trying to capture every possible sale, they multiplied their model offerings. With Hupmobile's production volume too low to generate economies of scale on any single model, costs crept up and competitiveness eroded. Sales and production began falling before the Depression arrived in 1930.

• 5. Loewy and the Last Designs

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  Raymond Loewy was brought in to design the 1932 Hupp Model K, a flashy roadster that performed well at the track. His second project for the company produced a striking restyle for 1934 called the Aerodynamic. Neither design reversed the company's declining sales. Stockholder conflicts and an attempted hostile takeover in 1935 added to the pressure. By 1936, Hupmobile was selling plants and assets. In 1937 the company suspended manufacturing altogether.

  A final attempt at revival reached back to the most dramatic car design of the decade. On the 8th of February 1938, Hupmobile acquired the production dies for the Gordon Buehrig-designed Cord 810, paying $900,000 for the tooling. The plan was to use the Cord's striking design as the basis for a lower-priced car called the Skylark. Thousands of enthusiastic orders came in. Then production delays mounted, customer support faded, and the promise of the Cord's looks could not save the brand. Lacking adequate facilities, Hupmobile partnered with the struggling Graham-Paige Motor Co. to share the Cord dies and use Graham-Paige's factory. Graham-Paige built a similar model under its own name called the Hollywood, differing from the Skylark in only minor details while each company used its own powertrain.

  In 1939, Skylark deliveries finally began. By then, too many years had passed and most orders had been canceled. Production lasted only a couple of months. Only 319 Skylarks were built before Hupmobile ceased production in late summer. Graham-Paige suspended production shortly after the last Hupmobile left the line.

• 6. What the Brand Left Behind

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  Carl Wickman was a car dealer in Hibbing, Minnesota, who had bought a 7-passenger Hupmobile he could not sell. Rather than take a loss, he used it to transport miners. That vehicle became the first of what grew into Greyhound Lines. A different legacy took shape in Canton, Ohio, in 1920, when the National Football League was organized at a meeting held inside a Hupmobile dealership owned by Ralph Hay.

  Hupmobile's technical contributions also outlasted the brand. The company was among the first American automakers to equip cars with free-wheeling, a mechanism that was briefly popular in the 1930s. Its fresh-air heating system, marketed under the name Evanair-Conditioner, became widely adopted across the industry. The Skylark's grille later influenced the design of Lincoln Continental models in the 1940s. Buick adopted the Skylark name for its own convertible and a one-off coupe in 1953. That nameplate then carried through a midsize model from 1961 to 1973, and a compact model from 1975 to 1998. Two Hupmobile buildings still stand: the dealership in Omaha, Nebraska, is a recognized historic landmark, and the former dealership in Washington, D.C., became the H Street Playhouse.