Daimler Twenty-Two

Among the 19 Daimler Company entries in the MotorJury library, the Daimler Twenty-Two holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1902. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Daimler Twenty-Two properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1900s were the pioneering years, when motoring was still an adventure for the wealthy, roads were unpaved, and every manufacturer was effectively an experimental workshop. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Mercedes-Benz Mercedes Simplex, the Studebaker Studebaker Electric, the Panhard Panhard & Levassor type B tonneau — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Daimler Twenty-Two reads like this: the record lists its engine as 4503 cc / electric ignition, hot tube backup / vertical inline 4-cylinder; quoted output is 22 bhp @ 720 rpm / 27.34 tax horsepower / RAC rating; kerb weight is recorded at 2500 lb bare chassis; drive goes through leather-lined clutch, flexible jointed splined propeller shaft to 4-speed and reverse gearbox enclosed as a unit with differential and countershaft in an aluminium casting. final d; the layout is front engine, rear-wheel-drive. Worked together, those figures give roughly 9 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Daimler Company story

Within Daimler Company's own catalogue the Daimler Twenty-Two sits alongside the BSA Light Six, the Critchley Light car, the Daimler 250, the Daimler Conquest. The record names the Daimler 16/18 as its predecessor and the Daimler 18/22 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Percy Martin (works manager) / E W Lewis (chief draughtsman). Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom: Coventry.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Daimler Twenty-Two was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.