Opel

In the autumn of 1928, on a straightaway outside Berlin, a young man named Fritz von Opel sat astride a motorcycle with rockets bolted to its frame and lit the fuse on one of the strangest publicity stunts in motoring history. The crowd at Avus that day had come to see cars and bicycles, mostly. What they got was the grandson of Adam Opel hurtling past them trailing fire, on a machine built by a company that most of Europe already associated with sewing machines, bicycles, and automobiles — not this. It's a fitting image for the Opel motorcycle story: brief, a little wild, and gone almost as quickly as it arrived.

Origins in Rüsselsheim

Opel's roots go back to January 21, 1862, when Adam Opel founded his company in Rüsselsheim, Hesse. There were no engines involved at all in the beginning — Opel built sewing machines, and built them well enough to become a serious name in that trade. In 1886 the company branched into high-wheel bicycles, the penny-farthings that were, for a decade or so, the height of personal mobility technology. By the time Adam Opel died in 1895, his firm led the field in both sewing machines and bicycles, a combination that sounds odd today but made a certain sense at the time: both were precision-manufactured goods sold to a growing middle class hungry for machines of their own.

His widow, Sophie Marie Opel, and their sons took the company forward from there. Automobile production began in 1899, and it was only shortly after that the firm's first powered two-wheeler appeared — the Opel Motorzweirad, with sources placing its debut anywhere from 1901 to a year or so earlier. Given where Opel had come from, this was no surprise. The company had spent fifteen years building bicycles; strapping an engine to one was the logical next step.

The Early Machines

The Motorzweirad looked exactly like what it was: a bicycle with a motor grafted on. Long, narrow, and unmistakably descended from the penny-farthing lineage, it carried its small engine within the frame and drove the rear wheel by belt, in the fashion common to nearly every early motorized bicycle in Europe. Output was modest — one and three-quarter horsepower — enough to push the machine to about 40 km/h, which at the time counted as genuinely brisk.

Opel's motorcycle manufacturing over the next three decades did not run continuously. By most accounts it came in three distinct bursts — roughly 1902 to 1907, then a second run following the Armistice from 1919 to 1924, and a final chapter beginning at the end of the 1920s and running through 1930. A factory fire in 1911 forced a rebuild, and motorcycle production resumed afterward in a new plant. Production picked up again after the First World War, continuing through the early 1920s. In 1908, in between, Opel had also put out a 140cc single-cylinder machine offered in men's, women's, and sport variants — barely a horsepower, barely 40 km/h on level ground, but proof the company was still tinkering with the format even as its automobile business grew into the more serious concern.

The Golden Era

Everything changed, briefly, at the end of the 1920s. Opel's four-valve single-cylinder racing engines had already been cleaning up in German competition since 1922, giving the marque a reputation on the track that its road machines hadn't quite matched. Then in 1928, Franz Gnädig — formerly a partner in the well-regarded Krieger-Gnädig firm — joined Opel, and with him came the company's third and, as it turned out, final push into motorcycles.

The move that defined this era was Opel's decision to buy the rights to Ernst Neumann-Neander's motorcycle design and put it into production as the Opel Motoclub. It was a striking machine: a 500cc overhead-valve single finished in red and silver, built around a pressed-steel frame that cut assembly time dramatically compared to conventional tubular construction. The 1929 Motoclub S made 22 horsepower from its 496cc dual-port engine, wrapped in a matte cadmium-plated steel frame with red trim that made it look, even now, like something built by a company that understood the automobile business rather than a firm dabbling on the side. Depending on what the buyer wanted, the Motoclub could be had with Küchen, J.A.P., or Motosacoche engines — a small detail that hints at how seriously Opel was courting the market in its last years as a motorcycle builder.

Racing and the Rocket Years

The Motoclub's competition record was solid on its own merits, but the name most associated with Opel motorcycle racing belongs to Fritz von Opel, grandson of the founder, who used the marque's speed ambitions as a stage for something closer to theater than motorsport. In 1928 he took an Opel Motoclub 500SS, fitted it with twelve solid-fuel rockets, and rode it at the Avus track in an attempt to beat the standing motorcycle speed record of 200.3 km/h set by Zenith. It was equal parts engineering experiment and publicity spectacle, and it worked: the Opel name traveled further on the strength of that stunt than it likely would have through years of ordinary racing results.

The same year, Opel's endurance efforts produced a genuine record on the track, when Belgian rider Léon Vanderstuyft, riding behind a pacer at the Montlhéry track near Paris, covered a reported 122.771 km/h, breaking the existing mark of 120.900 km/h. Opel also lent its name and money to bicycle racing and to pacing motorcycle events more broadly, and the company's own Opel-Rennbahn racetrack drew crowds as large as 50,000 for combined bicycle, motorcycle, and car meetings. For a company that had entered the motorcycle business almost as an afterthought to its bicycle trade, this was Opel at its most publicly ambitious on two wheels.

Landmark Models

If you had to point to two motorcycles that tell the whole Opel story, they'd be the bookends: the early Motorzweirad and the 1928–1930 Motoclub 500. The Motorzweirad is interesting mainly as an artifact — the moment a bicycle maker decided an engine belonged on its product, rendered in a form that still looked more like a bicycle than a motorcycle. The Motoclub is the machine collectors actually chase today: the licensed Neander design, the pressed-steel frame, the red-and-silver livery, the choice of British, German, or Swiss engines. It was, by any measure, a modern motorcycle for its moment — and it was also the last one Opel would ever build.

Ownership and the End of the Line

The Motoclub's production window closed almost exactly as Opel itself changed hands. General Motors began acquiring Opel stock on January 29, 1929, and by March 7 of that year held 80 percent of the company. By 1931, GM was the sole shareholder, having paid the Opel family a sum reported at around $33 million. The American company had bought itself a foothold in the European automobile market — motorcycles were never part of the plan. Even with modern prototypes reportedly still in development, GM's new management pushed to end motorcycle production in 1930, redirecting the company entirely toward cars. A commonly cited figure holds that Opel built around 6,000 motorcycles across its various production runs from 1901 onward, though that number is unverified and should be treated as an estimate rather than a settled count.

Opel remained under General Motors ownership for the better part of a century, until PSA Group purchased Opel and its British sister brand Vauxhall in March 2017. The subsequent 2021 merger of PSA with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles folded Opel into an even larger structure, but by then the motorcycle chapter was ninety years in the past and had never been reopened.

Opel Today

Opel has built cars, vans, and at various points bicycles, but it has not made a motorcycle since that 1930 shutdown. What survives is a small, tightly held population of original machines — the early belt-drive bicycles-with-engines, and above all the Motoclub — that collectors and museums prize well out of proportion to the brand's actual time in the motorcycle business. It's an odd footnote to a much larger corporate history: a sewing machine and bicycle maker that built cars for well over a century, but whose most vivid two-wheeled moment involves a young man riding a rocket-strapped Motoclub down a German racetrack, chasing a speed record and a headline in more or less equal measure. That the whole motorcycle enterprise lasted less than three decades, in fits and starts, only makes the Motoclub's engineering and the Avus stunt more worth remembering.