NW Präsident

Among the 18 Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau-Fabriks-Gesellschaft entries in the MotorJury library, the NW Präsident 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 1897. 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 NW Präsident properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1890s were the very dawn of the automobile, when the first petrol, steam and electric carriages were hand-built one at a time and a public demonstration run was front-page news. 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 Benz & Cie. Benz type Idéal vis-à-vis, the Oldsmobile Oldsmobile, the Panhard Panhard & Levassor Wagonette M2E CnAM 16715 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the NW Präsident reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2714 cc, 120 x bore/stroke, water cooled, flat-twin, Benz; quoted output is 6.5 bhp at; kerb weight is recorded at 1072 kg; drive goes through 2-speed; the layout is RR layout. Worked together, those figures give roughly 6 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 Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau-Fabriks-Gesellschaft story

Within Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau-Fabriks-Gesellschaft's own catalogue the NW Präsident sits alongside the NW A, the NW B, the NW C, the NW D. The record names the successor= as its predecessor and the image=PresidentFirstCar.jpg as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Hans Ledwinka, Edmund Rumpler. Assembly is recorded at Nesselsdorf, Margraviate of Moravia, Cisleithania.

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

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 NW Präsident was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.