Autocars Sussita - catalog and technical specifications

Autocars Sussita is a small 2-door sedan or station wagon, the first model of the Autocars company and the first car made in Israel. Produced from 1960 to the early 1970s. The simple car, designed by Reliant and partly built in Britain, received a fiberglass body assembled in Israel due to the ban on metal supplies from abroad and the huge investments required to build its own metallurgical produc... read alltion. Components were purchased from Triumph and Reliant, engines from Ford. The name of the first Israeli car was chosen by the whole country. Autocars has launched a competition for the best name with a cash prize of 500 Israeli pounds (the currency that preceded the new Israeli shekel). The company office received many letters; more than 2,000 people personally came to express their opinions. The epiphany came to student Yosef Shuv, who came up with the idea of ​​naming the car after the ancient city of Sussita, located east of the Sea of ​​Galilee. The name turned out to be symbolic: the Hebrew word “sus” means horse, the name of the city in Greek, Hippos, has the same meaning. In the first models, the fiberglass body was attached to the frame with a wooden frame, and the floor consisted partly of plywood. In Israel, there are still legends about camels that happily feasted on fiberglass, tearing pieces off the car. This myth explained the fact that many Sussitas were missing body parts. When Szubinski sent the car to a trade show in New York, it fell apart during shipping. Sussita could not boast of either aesthetics or the complexity and strength of its design, but it turned out to be quite expensive and could not in any way claim to be a people's car. They also forgot about comfort: there was no air conditioning or power steering in the cabin, soft seats appeared only in the 70s. However, the engines were of fairly high quality, allowing the car to remain on the move for a long time, and due to the simplicity of the Autocars Sussita design, it was easy to repair.