CarBrandLogos archive · Tatra · 1974
A Czech air-cooled V8 in a suit cut by Vignale in Turin.
Discover the storyPhoto: Roman Mifek · CC BY-SA 4.0
The story
Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Tatra 613, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.
01
For the successor to the 603, Tatra did something unexpected for a state enterprise in 1970s Czechoslovakia: it hired Vignale in Italy to style the car. The result was a crisp, angular four-door saloon that looked like a contemporary European executive car and gave no external hint of what was behind the rear seats.
Tatra 613-4 · Asterion talk to me (from english Wikipedia) · CC BY 2.5
02
Underneath, Tatra practice continued. A 3.5-litre air-cooled V8, now with overhead camshafts, sat behind the rear axle, driving through a four- or five-speed all-synchromesh manual with a floor-mounted lever, on the company's backbone chassis. Moving the engine's mass slightly forward relative to earlier cars improved the handling that had given Tatras their reputation, and the 613 was a genuinely capable high-speed car.
Tatra T613 Engine · User Asterion on en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 2.5
03
Around eleven thousand were built between 1974 and 1996 at Přibor, again mostly for state use, including ambulance and government convoy roles. Production limped on past the fall of communism, by which point the customer base had disappeared and imported western saloons were available. The Tatra 700 was a facelift of the same car and the end of the line; Tatra has built only trucks since.
1976Tatra T-613-rear · dave_7 · CC BY 2.0
At a glance
Produced
1974–1996Units built
11,000Engine
3.5L Tatra 613 V8Designer
VignaleTechnical specification
Badge at launch
This is the marque emblem that accompanied the Tatra 613's era. The full identity timeline is documented in the brand archive.
Explore the logo history →From the journal
Lineage
Contemporaries from the 1970s
Spotted something wrong on this page? Send us the correction — with a source, and we will fix it. How this site is written.
