Financial History Issue 114 (Summer 2015) | Page 36
Western Reserve Historical Society
Unique prototype of the Peerless all-aluminum touring sedan, 1932.
were the most-expensive, highest quality
cars in the US. They had precision-built
engines; the vehicles were durable and did
not have a lot of maintenance issues. The
luxury market was the only market at the
time, and Peerless had the best engines,
transmissions and bodies.”
Flush with success, Peerless built a new
factory at Quincy Avenue and East 93rd
Street, in the neighborhood known as
Fairfax. It grew to a huge complex sprawling over many blocks.
The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression hit the automobile industry hard, and
the hardest at the high end. “Through the
mid-’20s sales were slumping for Peerless,” said Moore. “They were trying to get
down market to a larger customer base by
The Owen Magnetic: A Hybrid Ahead of Its Time
In the broad and deep automobile collection of the Western Reserve Historical
Society (WRSH) in Cleveland is a dazzling
DeLorean coupe in bright brushed aluminum. It looks fast sitting still with its iconic
low, wicked, wedge profile and gull-wing
doors. The DeLorean does not have a flux
capacitor, but the WRHS does have a real
back-to-the-future vehicle in its possession. The power train in this automobile is
a gasoline engine that drives a generator,
which powers the wheels. It is instantly recognizable today as the basic hybrid drive.
But this is no post-millennial ecoecono-bubble. This sumptuous butteryellow touring sedan is a 1916 Owen Magnetic. It predated the modern hybrids by
almost a century.
It bears mentioning that while gasoline
was about 20 cents a gallon in 1916, that
is roughly equivalent to $3 a gallon today,
so fuel was not cheaper. If anything, given
prevailing wage rates, it was more expensive, but only the wealthy owned automobiles, so the price of gas was hardly
a general concern at the time. Even with
those fuel prices, the Owen Magnetic
was not an effort to economize. It was a
classic embodiment — in steel, glass and
leather — of a manufacturing company
doing its best to survive and adapt the
best it knew how.
Experiments in automobiles date to the
late 1600s. Steam, the e \