Tatra probably isn’t a manufacturer you’ve heard about. Currently, the company from the Czech Republic produces trucks but during a large portion of the previous century, it also designed and built the country’s most luxurious passenger vehicles. The Tatra 613, for example, was a four-door sedan with a V8 engine that was sold primarily to government officials and industry executives. One very rare example of the 613 is currently for sale in Czechia.
The car you see depicted in the gallery below is the 613 Electronic of which just 17 units were produced. This particular car was assembled in 1993 and features the said 3.5-liter V8 engine, mounted on the rear axle. It is an air-cooled mill, which in this application is equipped with an electronic fuel injection for a peak output of around 200 horsepower.
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While based on a model from the mid-1970s designed by Vignale, the Tatra 613 Electronic features a heavily modernized interior compared to its predecessors. It was released to compete with the finest German luxury sedans at the time and came equipped from the factory with a voice notification system, which reports vehicle faults and other important messages. Also, a more advanced instrument cluster was fitted with two small displays accompanying the traditional analog clocks.
This particular car is currently located in Prague and has 143,500 miles (231,000 kilometers) since new. The ad for the vehicle says it should still be capable of reaching 143 miles per hour (230 kilometers per hour), which is the model’s top speed listed by the factory. The seller wants around $110,000 (2,500,000 Czech Koruna) for the rare Czech sedan.
As a final note, we’d like to mention the 613 model was succeeded by the Tatra 700 in 1996, which was actually a heavily modernized version of the existing vehicle. It gained a larger 4.3-liter variant of the V8 engine, giving it slightly more power and a higher top speed. It wasn’t popular on the market though, as just 75 units were sold before production ceased in July 1999. The Tatra 700 was one of the last surviving production cars with an air-cooled engine.
