I do like the oddities of the automotive world and they don’t come much odder than the cars produced by the German DKW company. For a start, they were committed to the two-stroke engine and all their cars had the familiar clatter of that engine. Not content with that, they were the first to build a three-cylinder engine and it was used in almost all of their their cars.

Why two-stroke and why three cylinders? I would have to guess that they just liked being different. But it was a very effective difference – their engines were so light that they proved very handy in competition vehicles and DKW was a big name in rallying in the 50s. There was a strong rumor at the time that DKW stood for Deutches Kleine Wunder (little German wonder), a fitting enough accolade to the car and more accurate than the real meaning: Dampf-Kraft Wagen (steam-powered vehicle).

The car I remember from the early sixties was their 1000S, a fairly normal-looking family saloon, apart from that distinctive racket from the engine, of course. The Deek was common in Africa at the time and, even today, there is a thriving fanbase in South Africa. But the multiplicity of models and variants were to prove too much for the company to support; in 1964 they were absorbed by the Volkswagen Group and they ceased production of one of the most idiosyncratic cars on the road.

Many of these strange adventures in the automotive world were to prove ahead of their time. The two-stroke engine has been killed off by clean emissions legislation but the idea of odd-numbered cylinders has been reborn and lives again in the many five-cylinder engines of today. So it is good that we should remember DKW and the German engineers who insisted on doing things differently. The Wikipedia has a very good history of the company for those who are interested.