Hudson Motor: The Car Company That Launched a Thousand Getaways

Eight Detroit businessmen gathered on February twentieth, nineteen oh nine, and incorporated the Hudson Motor Car Company, named not for a river explorer, but for Joseph L. Hudson, the department-store magnate who put up the seed money and lent his name to the enterprise.

The founders, led by Roy Chapin and Howard Coffin, both veterans of Olds Motor Works, set a bold target: build a quality automobile that would sell for under a thousand dollars. The first year, they sold about four thousand five hundred cars, more first-year sales than any American automaker had ever recorded. Hudson grew quickly through the nineteen tens and became one of the top-selling independent manufacturers in the country.

In nineteen nineteen, Hudson launched the Essex line, a cheaper variant meant to bring the closed-body car within reach of working families. The strategy worked. By nineteen twenty-nine the company was producing three hundred thousand vehicles a year. Then the Depression hit. To survive, Hudson introduced the Terraplane in nineteen thirty-two: light, nimble, and powered by an inline six that could outrun most cars on the road. Amelia Earhart christened the new line at its debut in July of that year. The Terraplane's speed and low price made it a favorite of Depression-era bank robbers, most famously John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, who favored Terraplanes for quick escapes from Midwestern banks.

Hudson merged with Nash in nineteen fifty-four to form American Motors, but the Hudson name quietly disappeared from the new company's cars by nineteen fifty-seven. The factory site on East Jefferson became part of Detroit's postwar industrial landscape, eventually cleared. What remains is the brand's legacy: Hudson pioneered the step-down body design in nineteen forty-eight, placing the passenger floor below the frame rails for an unusually low center of gravity, an innovation the auto industry absorbed and never looked back.