The rare European car you've probably never heard of

By: Alex Forrest

Watch Alex meet Paul to discuss his 1952 Tatra T600 Tatraplan and take it for a drive.

Rare and obscure Eastern European cars have been a source of fascination for Paul Markham for many years.

So when he had the chance to purchase a rare, but run-down and barely running 1952 Tatra T600 right here in Western Australia, he took it. Even more special was that it was right-hand drive.

“Streamlining was really a pioneering technology in that period, plus it has a rear engine, so it’s very unusual,” says Paul. “It speaks to me as a very important development phase of the motor vehicle.”

“I came to own this mainly because nobody else wanted to own such a strange vehicle,” he says. “It had been in the York Motor Museum for about 30-odd years, and they were changing a few of their vehicles around, and this one came up for sale.”

“But it’s so unusual that very few people had an interest in it, so it didn’t immediately sell. Then the buyer found the vehicle.”

Paul says that nowadays, more people recognise the car for what it is.

He said that internationally, Tatra is much more recognisable than it used to be, which was evident when there was a special display at the renowned Pebble Beach Concours classic car show in California in 2014.

Tatra is now only a manufacturer of specialised trucks, but it has a long history of innovation with cars. It’s arguably best known for the streamlined cars it produced from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Paul’s car is one of those, a Tatra T600 built in 1952. As you’d expect, it has some quirks.

“You really do not want to have to reverse park in this. There are three windows you’re looking back through, and they’re little more than portholes,” he says. “You really need a lot of space and a person outside [the car] to wave you along.”

Paul says another quirk is that, despite its appearance as a streamlined and fast-looking vehicle, it really handles more like a truck. But he said that type of vehicle construction does have an upside.

“It’s solid as a rock. I don’t know what sort of steel they made these out of – it could have been leftover tank steel. When we stripped the car down, it had no rust whatsoever, despite the 70-odd years this car has been around.”