The Jawa 700 was a car produced by
Jawa in
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
during the 1930s.
Background
František Janeček
František Janeček (1878–1941) was the founder of Jawa motorcycles and an important figure in the development of the Czechoslovakian motorcycle industry. He died on 4 June 1941.
Early life
Janeček was born on 23 January 1878 in Klášter nad ...
, the founder of the successful Czech motorcycle manufacturer Jawa, signed a license agreement with
Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen
Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen (30 July 1878 – 12 August 1964) was a Denmark, Danish engineer and industrialist.
Life
The son of a shipmaster who died when Rasmussen was still a young child, he attended middle school in Nakskov and in 1894 began ...
of
DKW
DKW (''Dampfkraftwagen'', – the same initials later also used for ''Des Knaben Wunsch'', ; ''Das Kleine Wunder'', and ''Deutsche Kinderwagen'', ) was a German car- and motorcycle-marque. DKW was one of the four companies that formed Auto U ...
on 20 July 1933 to produce the German company's cars in Czechoslovakia.
The first fruit of this agreement was the Jawa 700, based on the
DKW F2
The DKW F2, firstly marketed as "DKW Meisterklasse", is a front wheel drive economy car produced by Auto Union's DKW division from 1932 to 1935 at the company’s Zwickau plant. It was launched at the Berlin Motor Show in April 1932. It shared its ...
Meisterklasse, which was known internally as the 701.
Design
The 700 was a front-wheel drive vehicle with a two stroke engine. It differed from its DKW parent in having a longer wheelbase and wheels. Unusually, as cars in Czechoslovakia drove on the left at the time, the car was
left hand drive
Left-hand traffic (LHT) and right-hand traffic (RHT) are the practices, in bidirectional traffic, of keeping to the left side or to the right side of the road, respectively. They are fundamental to traffic flow, and are sometimes called the ' ...
.
[
]
Production
The 700 was launched at the 1934 Prague Motor Show.[ Priced at 22,900 CSK in its four-seater guise, 1,002 vehicles were manufactured before production ceased in June 1937.]
Performance
The Jawa 700 could reach a top speed of between and had a typical fuel consumption of between .[
]
References
{{Authority control
Cars introduced in 1934
Cars of the Czech Republic
Front-wheel-drive vehicles
Sedans
Roadsters