Hudson Commodore

This is the catalogue record of the Hudson Commodore, one of 13 models Hudson Motor Car Company has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1941. 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 Hudson Commodore properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1940s were a decade split in two by war — civilian production stopped almost everywhere, and the cars that followed 1945 carried pre-war engineering into a world desperate for transport. 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 Ford Lincoln Continental, the Volkswagen Volkswagen Beetle, the Peugeot Peugeot VLV — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Hudson Commodore reads like this: the record lists its engine as 212 cuin I6 / 254 cuin I8; quoted output is 92-102 hp @ 4,000 rpm / 120-145 lbft @ 1,600 rpm; kerb weight is recorded at 2950-3230 lb; drive goes through 3-speed Manual / 3-speed manual with overdrive; the layout is FR layout. Worked together, those figures give roughly 31 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 Hudson Motor Car Company story

Within Hudson Motor Car Company's own catalogue the Hudson Commodore sits alongside the Essex (1917), the Hudson Custom Eight, the Hudson DeLuxe Eight, the Hudson Greater Eight. The record names the Hudson Greater Eight as its predecessor, anchoring one end of its lineage. Assembly is recorded at Detroit, Michigan, United States.

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.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Hudson Commodore was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.