With its advanced 76-horsepower engine, the 1916 Super Six put the Hudson Motor Car Company on the map.
Founded in 1909 and named after its most prominent investor, department store tycoon J.L. Hudson, the Hudson Motor Car Company was already a successful and respected carmaker when the Super Six was introduced. The company had begun producing six-cylinder cars in 1913, as co-founder Howard Coffin was rightly convinced that an engine with multiple, small cylinders was superior in smoothness and performance to fewer and larger.
Chasing that principle, the company experimented with V8 and 12-cylinder engines before deciding that for Hudson, the ideal package combining power, smoothness, size, and weight was an inline six. The Hudson crew then went to work engineering the most advanced six they knew how to build, and it appeared on January 16, 1916 as the Hudson Super Six. The promotional materials included a semi-technical booklet titled Six Little Cylinders.
At 421 CID, Hudson’s first six in 1913 was relatively enormous. The Super Six was considerably smaller—with a 3.5-in bore and 5.0 in stroke, it displaced 288.5 cubic inches. Forward-leaning features a monobloc cylinder casting and a plunger-type oil pump regulated by the throttle linkage. But the L-head’s most notable advance was the fully-counterweighted crankshaft with eight counterweights, for which Hudson was awarded a U.S. patent. This, Hudson said, was the key to the engine’s remarkable smoothness, ruggedness, and performance. Its rated output was a stunning 76 horsepower at 2,450 rpm. The 1915 Cadillac V8 produced 70 hp.
Hudson promoted the Super Six with a series of impressive stunts. The roadster in the lead photo above ran 75 mph for 24 hours, covering 1,819 miles. At Sheepshead Bay, a stock touring car with two passengers aboard averaged 74.67 mph for 100 miles. On the sand at Daytona Beach, race driver Ralph Mulford ran the flying mile at 102.53 mph, and then in the same specially-bodied car, he set a record for stock production cars at the Pikes Peak Hill Climb that stood for eight years. The Super Six and its advanced six-cylinder engine put Hudson on the map.
With prices starting at $1,375, roughly in the Buick class, the Super Six was offered in numerous body styles, open and closed. Hudson was so confident of the engine’s power and smoothness that even a Town Car and a Limousine (below) were offered. Deliveries doubled to nearly 26,000 cars in 1916, and the same basic engine remained in production through 1926. Meanwhile, the model name became an evergreen at Hudson, in use through much of the company’s history. The last Super Six, A Step-Down model in five body styles, was produced in 1951.
