Pick of the Day is a Stoewer, an unsung brand from the Baltic

When I was decades younger, my family and the Kobliska family liked to go fossil hunting. We’d drive to some rock pile, find a rock with a promising shape, take our geology hammers (sort of a miniature hand-held pick axe) and crack the rock open. Sometimes we’d even find a fossil, and when we did it was a thrill.

Searching through the collector car automobile advertisements on ClassicCars.com can be a similar experience as we hunt for that special vehicle we feel is worth sharing with our audience here at the Journal. The Pick of the Day is such a car, and it’s from a brand I’d not known previously.

It is a 1940 Stoewer Sedina Pullman with cabriolet roof, which is being advertised on ClassicCars.com by a private party in New Providence, New Jersey. However, and it’s a big however, the vehicle is located in Russia, though the seller notes that “worldwide shipping is available at purchaser’s cost.”

“This car is so rare that ClassicCars.com had to add the make and model in order for us to list it,” the seller notes. “Believe it or not, this vehicle actually runs,” and the ad includes a 10-second video of the engine running.

“Currently, it is estimated that only 12 of these vehicles are left in the world — and this may be the only (one) with a cabriolet roof left,” the seller adds.

There’s not a lot more information in the ad, other than the exterior color — cream and burgundy — the interior color — burgundy — and that the car has a manual transmission. The car is being offered for $75,000.

Although I’d never heard of Stoewer, The Beaulieu Encyclopedia of the Automobile devotes more than two pages to the brand. The company was in operation from 1899 to 1940 in Germany, not in the heart of the German auto industry but in the Baltic port city of Stettin, where it produced 40,000 vehicles through the years.

Brothers Emil and Bernhard Stoewer established the auto company after working for their family’s ironworks. 

Kaiser Wilhelm II bought a Stoewer in the first decade of the 20th Century, and it was about the same time that a Stoewer G5 did 67 mph in the flying-mile trials at England’s Brooklands circuit. The Encyclopedia shows photos of four Stoewers, each with what might have been considered advanced design for the periods of their production.

The Encyclopedia notes that Bernhard Stoewer left the company to join Opel in 1934 and that the subsequent “Sedina and Arkona were good-looking cars but offered nothing original.”

To view this Sedina on ClassicCars.com, see Pick of the Day.