KROBOTH | 1950-55 | Germany :
The marque was the work of one displaced engineer rebuilding a career from scratch. Gustav Kroboth, who lived from 1903 to 1984, had already built motor vehicles before the Second World War at his Favorit works in Šternberk in the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia, and after the war he founded the firm Fahrzeug- und Maschinenbau Gustav Kroboth at Seestall, near Landsberg am Lech in Bavaria, in 1949 and began producing motor scooters. He had been a car constructor of some note in pre-war Bohemia, building around 150 examples of his BMW Dixi-like Favorit with backing from a thread-factory owner, and after the German-speaking population was expelled from the Sudetenland in 1945 he found himself in Bavaria, where he scrounged parts from abandoned military vehicles and built wooden toys, poppy-seed grinders and farm equipment, the grinders generating enough income to finance his next project.
The scooters that followed were defined by a deliberate engineering choice. The first Kroboth scooters ran in January 1950, and the very first test runs convinced him that a machine with its engine under the seat and all the weight over the rear wheel could not be reconciled with good road holding and safety, so within a few months he switched to the layout he kept thereafter, moving the engine toward the centre and as far forward as possible and placing the fuel tank at the front. The scooters used Fichtel and Sachs engines and a triangulated tubular-steel frame that was stiff and free of torsion. The Sachs units were offered in capacities of 98, 147 and 173cc.
When scooter demand fell, Kroboth turned to a small enclosed vehicle. The Kroboth Allwetterroller, a three-wheeled scooter-car produced from 1954, came to market as scooter sales declined, and it was an open two-seater with two wheels at the front on a 1,150-millimetre track and a single wheel at the rear, fitted with a folding top and insertable windows that gave it its all-weather name. The body sat on a central-tube frame with transverse leaf springs at the front and longitudinal leaf springs at the rear, and the rear-mounted 175cc air-cooled single-cylinder Sachs two-stroke produced nine horsepower, with a 197cc fan-cooled ILO unit of 9.5 horsepower available as an alternative, driving through a three-speed gearbox with reverse operated by a lever on the steering wheel. The little three-wheeler accumulated some 20,000 test kilometres on the winding Bavarian mountain roads, a bank loan funded a small factory, the first customer deliveries came in August 1954, and Kroboth was at pains to present it not as a substitute for a real car but as a motorcycle offering easy maintenance with car-like comfort.
The venture was short and small in scale. The Allwetterroller was introduced at a 1954 motorcycle show, and some 55 were produced before the factory closed in 1955, with other accounts putting the total at roughly 50 or 56 examples, and the firm going bankrupt in the summer of 1955.
