Stutz DV32 - World Of Classic Cars - Rank 104

Stutz DV32 Convertible Sedan 1932

Dual overhead camshafts, associated with racing since the pre-World War I days of the Grand Prix Peugeots, were still pretty exotic stuff in the 1930s. L-head designs ruled the day, even among luxury car builders like Packard and Lincoln. In fact, in the early 1930s, only two American car companies offered DOHC engines for sale to the general public: Duesenberg and Stutz.
Both companies had a rich racing heritage, and so it's not surprising that both embraced the multi-cam arrangement, even as other automakers were ratcheting up the cylinder count. The starting point for the Stutz's DOHC entry was the Vertical Eight, a design credited to a veteran automotive engineer named Charles O. Greuter. The eight, designed while "Pop" Greuter was working at the Excelsior Motor Company in Chicago, featured a single overhead camshaft, nine main bearings, a crossflow cylinder head with two valves per cylinder and dual ignition, making it powerful and smooth.

Stutz DV32 Super Bearcat 1932

Greuter's eight came to the attention of Frederick E. Moskovics, who had been brought in to rescue a stumbling Stutz in 1925. Moskovics took Greuter aboard, and set him to work adapting the engine for a racy new model, to be called the Series AA. The major change in the engine's design was the use of a "silent" chain to power the camshaft, rather than a vertical shaft and noisy bevel gears. The original Vertical Eight wrung 92 horsepower from its 287 cubic inches, excellent by the standards of the day.
The ultimate development of the Vertical Eight arrived in the spring of 1931. The new engine's name, DV-32, was a reference to its dual overhead camshafts and total of 32 valves, four per cylinder. The dual valves increased the engine's breathing capacity by 60 percent, while allowing each spark plug to be centrally located, for better flame propagation. With a displacement of 322 cubic inches, the DV-32 produced a heady 156 horsepower at 3,900 RPM, just 5 horsepower less than the heavier and more complex L-head V-12s from Lincoln and Packard, and 20 less than Cadillac's overhead-valve V-16. The single-cam version of the eight, now called the SV-16, was still available, and was conservatively rated at 113hp at 3,300 RPM.

Stutz DV32 Convertible Victoria 1931

Was the DV-32 an attempt to compete in the cylinder race? Stutz historian Mark Howell didn't think so: "Stutz was the only company in the entire American industry...that built and designed motorcars by sporting machine standards, thus it can only be judged by those standards," he wrote in Racing Stutz, excerpted in The Splendid Stutz, the marque history published by the Stutz Club. "At that time, the world's finest cars of this type did not use 12 or 16 cylinders. They used straight-eight power plants with twin overhead camshafts.... This was not prompted by the bhp race but rather by a desire for consistent refinement of the original Stutz 8 design."

Stutz DV32 Dual Cowl Phaeton 1933

The new car made a big impression on reviewers, particularly in Europe. "The charm of the big engine propelling the car effortlessly at 60 or even 70 MPH has to be experienced to be believed," the British magazine Autocar reported, calling the Stutz one of "the world's more remarkable cars." But it was one of the world's more expensive cars, too: at $5,295 for a LeBaron five-passenger sedan, it was $200 more expensive than a Cadillac V-16 Fleetwood. Sales were predictably slow, and after 1934, passenger car production had come to an end.