1916 Woods

edited by David Barth, 30 January 2009.
Courtesy The Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Photos were taken in January 2009.

After an unsuccessful attempt at building an electric car, Francis A. Woods concentrated his efforts on a new venture, the cycle car, a vehicle that was supposed to combine the best features of an automobile and a motorcycle. Woods' first two models were experimental vehicles. The first production model was the Model 3, which came onto the market in the fall of 1913. Its distinguishing feature was its seating arrangement, with a single passenger seat placed directly behind the driver like a tandem bicycle. This arrangement assured that the cars would be lightweight and narrow enough to provide maneuverability, sometimes in surprising places. In 1914 a reliability run for cycle cars was held between Chicago and Indianapolis just after several days of very heavy rain. "The citizens of one Indiana town were plentifully surprised when the Chicago contingent took the sidewalk in preference to a particularly muddy roadway."

Woods Mobilette was one of the more successful manufacturers of cycle cars, with production reaching a claimed 1,000 cars per month in late 1924. However, production declined after that because the seating arrangement was not very popular, and a cycle car's low cost was not that attractive. In 1916 Woods Mobilette introduced staggered seating, an attempt to retain some of the car's narrow width wile adopting more conventional seating. However, with a 2-passenger Model T Ford selling for just $440, and a 5-passenger for $490, the Woods Mobilette and other cycle cars could not keep up and production ended in 1916.

Model: 5
Body Style: Roadster
Original Factory Price: $380
Brake Horsepower: 12
Displacement: 68.7 cubic inches
Bore: 2 1/2 inches
Stroke: 3 1/2 inches
Cylinders: 4
Wheelbase: 104 inches
Manufacturer: Woods Mobilette Company
Location: Harvey (Chicago), Illinois, USA
Years of Production: 19136-1916

From the TRW Collection, formerly, the Thompson Auto Album and Aviation Museum