We promised you a difficult quiz and you got one! At least, we think so as we only received four answers, all correctly identifying
our quiz car as the Otomo, made in Japan. Perhaps our little clue to get up at sunrise wasn't much of a help? The four correct answers came from Gerry Barrett, Fritz Hegeman, Anders Svenfelt and Alan Spencer. We had a tough time weighing the answers as they all were so very close, but in the end we decided that Alan included just a little bit more details in his answer. He wrote: "This is a Japanese Otomo, designed by US-educated inventor Junya Toyokawa, and built at the Hakuyosha Ironworks in Tokyo from 1924 to 1927. The Otomo was developed from Toyokawa's experimental Ales cars from 1921 (editor:
Ales is Ares in Japanese). The first Otomo cars had a 944cc, 4-cylinder, air-cooled engine; in 1926, water cooling was introduced. The Otomo is claimed to be the first Japanese car to be exported, based on a shipment of cars to Shanghai. Although there were plans for mass production, it never happened, and meanwhile, the Otomo was outsold in Japan by cheaper Fords and Chevrolets." Congratulations Alan with your second win! Although a reproduction,
there's still one Otomo in the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo.
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