Start with what the Tatra 13 is: a car with 1.1L Tatra 11 air-cooled flat-twin, built from 1924 to 1933, the vintage years, when coachbuilders still shaped most of what was sold. What it meant takes a little longer.
How it came about
The Tatra 13 is a vintage truck made by Czech manufacturer Tatra. It was manufactured between 1924 and 1933. The Tatra 13 can be considered one of the first utility vehicles designed, constructed, and mass produced by Tatra.
The truck was derived from model Tatra 11, with which it shared components and differed from it by strengthened rear axle. Initially the front wheels didn't have brakes. As Tatra 11 was succeeded by Tatra 12 (1926), the truck underwent modernization, which among other things brought it brakes to all four wheels.
The hardware
The engine is 1.1L Tatra 11 air-cooled flat-twin; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. On the scales it comes to 800-1200 kg. Drive goes through a 4-speed manual. The layout matters: a front engine drives the rear wheels, the classic proportion — long bonnet, cabin set back — that most people picture when they picture a sports saloon or a grand tourer. The wheelbase is 2646 mm. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Family and rivals
In the Tatra line-up the Tatra 13 has a clear place: the factory was Kopřivnice, Moravia, Czechoslovakia. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Rolls-Royce Silver-Ghost landaulet, the Packard Eight, the Chrysler Six. Its Tatra stablemates include the Tatra 10 and the Tatra 600 kabriolet.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Tatra 13 — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.