M28

The 170 H and the 170 V appeared together at the Berlin motor show in February 1936, sharing a side-valve four that had been planned as a 1.6-liter and enlarged to 1,697 cc shortly before production — bore and stroke both grown to lift torque rather than peak output. In the W 28 it stood upright and lengthways in the tail, with the four-speed gearbox and its overdrive ahead of the rear axle, exactly as in the Typ 130 the car replaced. Compression of 6.0:1, a single Solex updraft carburetor, 38 PS at 3,400 rpm, and 110 km/h.

The rear-engined car was the better appointed of the two and, at 4,350 Reichsmark, some 15 per cent dearer; the cheaper, more conventional and far less demanding 170 V buried it. Only 1,507 were built between July 1935 and October 1939, when war and weak demand closed the rear-engine line with no successor named. The same 1,697 cc four also went into the 170 VG of 1935, an all-wheel-drive Kübelwagen worked by two levers on the tunnel; the Wehrmacht took 62 of them, then chose Stoewer’s standard light car and never came back.