What price safety? If you're listening to the opinions of the experts on the internet you'd probably be saying something like "more Nazi officers died in Tatras..." right now. As I've covered many times before, that story is almost entirely fake, created out of the conceit of modern motoring authors who do cannot place themselves in the mind of a 1930s driver.
The manufacturer's advertising claims should never be taken as proof, but this rare English language brochure covers many important points about why Tatras were seen as being more safe than a traditional car in the mid-1930s. Most importantly, the Tatra T77's low-slung chassis and low centre of gravity. This single feature offered substantially better road holding than the higher mounted, heavy chassis of traditionally constructed cars. When combined with solid rear axles and high, heavy bodywork, traditionally constructed cars were particularly unstable on rough roads and in hard turns. Deaths through rollovers were common place, even at slow speed. With our more modern understanding of engineering, we can appreciate that the Tatra's swing axles could behave negatively when pushed to their limits, but this would only have been apparent in extreme circumstances. Contemporary drivers were astonished by the Tatra's performance and complimented it for its excellent handling qualities. https://tatrat600.blogspot.com/2022/04/tatra-t77-collected-customer-letters.html If you want to understand how Tatras were actually perceived by their drivers, read the letters.
Thanks again to Gary Cullen for publishing this rare brochure online at Peter Mika's Tatra Streamline page on Facebook.
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