Bison

A Workshop on Perchtoldsdorferstraße

Walk the Perchtoldsdorferstraße in Liesing today and there's nothing to mark what happened at number 9 in 1922. Liesing was then still its own municipality on the edge of Vienna, a place of small workshops and iron works, not yet swallowed into the city's twenty-third district. It was here that a young engineer named Oskar Hacker set up a motorcycle works and gave it a name meant to suggest raw Alpine power: Bison. Hacker was 26 when he did it, old enough to have already gathered some engineering experience but young enough that founding his own works was still a considerable gamble.

What isn't in dispute is that Hacker started from nothing. Bison Motorradfabrik G.m.b.H. wasn't a sideline for a firm that had been building bicycles or stationary engines — it was founded specifically, and only, to build motorcycles. The company's advertising leaned hard into national pride, promising "Das österreichische Motorrad – ein Urbild von Kraft und Ausdauer!" — the Austrian motorcycle, an embodiment of strength and endurance. It was a bold claim for a firm that would not survive three full years of trading, but in the chaos of the early 1920s, plenty of small European manufacturers were making similarly large promises on similarly small budgets.

Building the Bison

The machine Hacker registered in 1922 wore its influences openly. The layout followed the English Douglas closely enough that anyone who'd seen one would recognize the family resemblance: a horizontally-opposed engine mounted longitudinally in the frame, rather than transversely across it, giving the Bison a low, long-legged stance. The gearshift lever and its mechanism were tucked into the tank, and the seating position sat low to the ground. Bison even offered tandem seating on some models, a two-up arrangement that was already becoming unusual by the standards of the day, alongside the more conventional solo layout.

The engines came from BMW — the Bavarian firm's boxer twins, adapted to the longitudinal mounting Hacker's design called for. It was a sensible choice on paper: BMW's flat-twin was a proven unit, and buying engines in rather than developing one's own was standard practice for a small assembler trying to get a product to market quickly. Bison also used Bosch-Douglas engines sourced from SMW — Stockdorfer Motorenwerke AG, near Munich — a supplier whose units turn up in the history of several other obscure marques of the period, among them Linsner, SBD, and the curious wooden-framed Hirsch. None of these names survived long either; the early 1920s German and Austrian motorcycle trade was thick with small firms buying the same handful of proprietary engines and hoping their frame, their branding, or their price would be the thing that won customers.

For Bison, the answer arrived in the form of the Type 312, built around BMW's M2B15 engine and driven through a chain rather than the shaft drive BMW itself would become known for. It's this model, in solo form, that represents nearly everything we can still see of the marque today.

A Golden Era That Wasn't

It would be generous to call what came next a golden era, though every marque history needs one, and Bison's is worth telling honestly precisely because it was so brief. The company barely got its footing before the ground shifted under it. Austria in the early 1920s was living through severe currency instability and economic contraction in the aftermath of the empire's collapse, and a small motorcycle manufacturer dependent on imported German engines was exposed on two fronts at once — a shrinking domestic market for what was still a luxury purchase, and possible supply difficulties getting BMW's engines across the border in the quantities and terms a small firm needed.

By 1924, sales had already thinned out. Hacker's team made one more attempt at a fresh model that year, fitting a Coventry-Eagle 688cc horizontally-opposed twin in place of the BMW unit, offered as the solo Type 412 and the tandem Type 422. It was a reasonable pivot — if BMW supply was the problem, an English proprietary twin was a workable substitute — but it came too late to change the trajectory. The wider economic climate wasn't cooperating, and a firm with no reserves to speak of had no room left to maneuver.

Ownership, Handover, and Collapse

Hacker didn't run Bison alone for long. In 1923, just a year after founding it, he sold the business to Wilhelm Lovrek, an iron and metalware manufacturer operating out of the same Perchtoldsdorferstraße address in Liesing. Hacker stayed on afterward in a reduced capacity, apparently as proxy rather than principal, which suggests he wanted to keep a hand in the engineering even after giving up ownership. It's a common enough pattern among founder-engineers of the period: the person who can design the motorcycle isn't always the person equipped to keep the books balanced through a currency crisis.

Lovrek's ownership didn't buy Bison much time. The Coventry-Eagle-engined models of 1924 were the marque's last real attempt to right itself, and by the end of that year liquidation had become unavoidable. The insolvency hearing was held in January 1925, closing the book on a company that had existed, in total, for barely three years. There was no dramatic final chapter, no last defiant model — just the ordinary, quiet ending common to most small motorcycle makers of the era who guessed wrong about timing, financing, or both.

Racing

There is no surviving record of Bison taking part in racing, trials, or hillclimbs, and it would be dishonest to invent one for the sake of a fuller-sounding story. Small Austrian manufacturers of the early 1920s sometimes entered local competition without leaving much of a paper trail, so it's possible a Bison saw some kind of competition somewhere in Lower Austria in 1923 or 1924 — but nothing in the surviving record supports that, and the honest answer is that Bison seems to have lived and died as a road-going proposition only, competing on price and engineering rather than the results board.

What Survives

Bison's afterlife is unusually thin even by the standards of failed 1920s marques, most of which at least leave behind a handful of survivors scattered across private collections and small museums. As far as anyone has been able to establish, exactly one Bison motorcycle still exists: a 1922 Type 312 solo, powered by the BMW M2B15 engine and fitted with chain drive, now on display at the Vorchdorf Museum. One German museum reference dates this machine to 1921 rather than 1922, which doesn't square with the weight of other documentation, but it's worth flagging rather than quietly smoothing over — with a marque this poorly recorded, a one-year discrepancy in a single source is the kind of thing that happens, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

That single machine is, for all practical purposes, the entire physical inheritance of a company that once promised Austria a motorcycle built in the image of strength and endurance. No Coventry-Eagle-engined Type 412 or 422 is known to have survived. No factory records of any depth appear to exist beyond what's been reconstructed by researchers piecing together registration filings, insolvency documents, and period advertising. Bison didn't get the chance to build a reputation robust enough to protect its machines from the scrapyard in the decades that followed — a fate shared by dozens of small interwar manufacturers whose names now survive mainly in specialist marque databases rather than public memory.

The Marque Today

Bison is not a brand awaiting revival. There is no modern entity trading on the name, no retro-styled reissue drawing on Hacker's original design, and nothing to suggest anyone has tried to resurrect it the way so many defunct European marques have been resurrected, sincerely or cynically, over the past few decades. It ceased trading in January 1925 and it has stayed ceased ever since.

What Bison offers instead is a clean, contained case study in how fragile the small motorcycle manufacturer's position was in the early 1920s. Hacker had a workable design, a sound engine supplier in BMW, a second option in Coventry-Eagle when the first supply line looked shaky, and a name and slogan built for a domestic market hungry for a home-grown alternative to imported machines. None of it was enough against the economic conditions of the period. For collectors and historians of Austrian motoring, that single surviving Type 312 in Vorchdorf is as close as anyone will get to standing in front of what Oskar Hacker actually built — a low-slung, BMW-powered motorcycle from a company that burned bright, briefly, on a side street in Liesing, and then didn't.