Driving the Tatra T700 was heartbreaking.

Not the act of driving it. Despite being the inverse of every large luxury sedan in North America—rear-engine, air-cooled, manual transmission—from the driver's seat, this 1996 T700 feels only slightly different from the typical car of its era. If you didn't know it was built in the Czech Republic, by a heavy truck manufacturer with a side business making limousines for high-ranking Communist party members, you'd think it was just another European four-door with a trunkload of pistons and quirk.

It's a bittersweet realization. With the T700, Tatra endeavored to become a modern European automaker. Instead, it was the last passenger car the company ever built.

Wes Duenkel

A lazy summary would call Tatra the Czech Volkswagen; the inverse is more accurate. Tatra's first automobile appeared in 1897; it's the second-oldest continually-operating motor vehicle company in the world. Adolf Hitler, smitten with the streamlined Tatras he saw in early 1930s Czechoslovakia, gushed about the automaker to Ferdinand Porsche—whose Volkswagen, commissioned by Hitler, bore suspicious similarities to Tatra's rear-engine, air-cooled, tunnel-chassis designs. In 1965, Volkswagen paid Tatra a huge sum to settle a patent infringement suit out-of-court. The suit, filed before the start of World War II, was held up when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, taking over Tatra's plants to funnel heavy trucks to the Wehrmacht.

Politics continued to shape Tatra after the war. Not long after a Soviet-backed coup turned Czechoslovakia communist, Tatra was chosen as the sole automaker to supply luxury cars for party officials and heads of state-backed industry. Tatra's rear-engine, air-cooled limousines, having zero competitors, evolved in a bizarre ecosystem; with its close-set headlights, the teardrop-shaped 603, built from 1956 to 1975, looks like a deep-sea fish compared to its Western contemporaries. The 613 that followed was blessed with a more modern, Vignale-designed body and a larger air-cooled V8 that would eventually grow to make around 200 horsepower. But you still had to be a high-ranking party member to drive one.

Wes Duenkel

Before I got behind the wheel of the burgundy 1996 Tatra T700 you see here, I took a stroll through its family tree. This car, along with nearly two dozen other Tatras, belongs to the Lane Motor Museum of Nashville, Tennessee, an absolute treasure trove of strange, beautiful and unlikely motor vehicles of all varieties. At the Lane, the cars get driven—and the gracious, knowledgable staff was kind enough to toss me the keys to the only T700 in the United States.

Compared to the innovative, thoroughly unconventional engineering Tatra explored in its early years, the T700 feels a step closer to normal. It has the long and narrow proportions of a 1980s Mercedes-Benz S-Class; the smooth-nose look makes more sense here than it did on the no-grille American sedans of the '80s and '90s. The generous wheelbase, with the back doors ending several inches ahead of the rear wheels, gives the car a ponderous side profile, but the most modern Tatra passenger car has none of the Soviet sci-fi foreboding of its 1960s comrades.

The author demonstrating the storage capacity of the Tatra’s front trunk. Wes Duenkel

I'd spent plenty of time reading about Tatra, with its unfathomable history and stalwart dedication to a drivetrain layout seen at no other automaker. Sliding behind the T700's wheel, I expected bone-deep weirdness from the car. I braced myself for right turns when I steered left, or a shift pattern shaped like a pointy consonant from the Slovak alphabet.

Instead, I find things you'd anticipate in any pre-smartphone luxury car—dual-zone automatic climate control, rear-seat reading lights, privacy shades. The power window switches are on the center console, countersunk in wood trim; the spacious rear seat boasts plenty of leg room and a completely flat floor, thanks to no driveshaft. It won't win any design awards, but the T700 is comfortable and inviting.

Wes Duenkel

The fuel-injected, air-cooled V8 fires up and settles into a thudding idle. The shifter, working a complex mechanism reaching more than a yard rearward, notches lightly into first gear, a dogleg left-and-down arrangement. Out on the street, the only hint that I'm driving something unusual is the distant rumble of the engine behind me. The steering is weighty but not taxing; the five-speed doesn't like quick shifts. Acceleration is gradual, until I realize I'm only using half of the pedal's lengthy travel, an engineer's trick to smooth out a jerky driver's input. Once I really floor it, the cigar-tube Tatra rears its unweighted nose high and muscles forward with the haste of a modern car as it surfs a wave of distant small-bore V8 snarl.

The acceleration is impressive, and handy in traffic, but it's not how this car was meant to be driven. The long-wheelbase sedan is clearly tuned for smooth driving. It floats on soft suspension, eating up bumps and gliding through railroad crossings with Eastern Bloc nonchalance. It's all very dignified, befitting the commissar who'd be riding in the back seat.

Wes Duenkel

But the commissar never came. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution pushed out Czechoslovakia's communists in favor of democracy; on the first day of 1993, the nation was no more, split in two to form the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic. Citizens were no longer banned from purchasing a Tatra luxury sedan—or anything else.

"After 1989 everybody wanted to try something from 'the west'—Mercedes, BMW," Ondřej Skácel told me via email. Skácel, a design and development manager at today's Tatra Trucks, loves the old sedans enough to own one, but he's blunt about the challenges the automaker faced in a newly-opened market. For Czech car buyers, it was difficult to see Tatra as anything other than the communist party boss's car, Skácel said. After 1989, Tatra sprinted to catch up to the industry, adding five-speed gearboxes, fuel injection, and more luxurious leather interiors in quick succession. But core features that had long been available on western cars—like anticorrosion protection, airbags, automatic transmissions, and anti-lock brakes—were missing, Skácel explained.

Wes Duenkel

Tatra introduced the T700 in 1996 as an all-new car; in truth, it was a significant revamp of the T613, a model that traced back to 1975. The fresh-looking Geoff Wardle-designed bodywork wasn't enough to distance the automaker from its past image. The burgundy T700 I drove was the third example ever built; fewer than 100 were made before Tatra's passenger car division folded entirely.

There's a word that comes to mind: Ersatz. German for "substitute," the term took on a pejorative meaning after WWII. In Eastern Europe, when constant trade embargoes made coffee scarce, people drank "ersatzkaffee," made with roasted grain. In more dire times, "ersatzbrot," bread made with potato starch often cut with sawdust, was a common meal.

Wes Duenkel

The Tatra T700, then, is an ersatz-Mercedes—an approximation made from whatever was available to the people who built it. That's not a criticism. Tatra survived two totalitarian regimes; after half a century with zero competition, the official automaker of the Czech planned economy was thrust into the global market, forced to compete with the best of Western Europe. Perhaps it's not surprising that Tatra's wholehearted best effort couldn't compete with the state of the art. What's surprising, and heartbreaking, is that it got as close as it did.

Special thanks to the staff at The Lane Motor Museum for making this story possible.