People
US importer and product instigator
The record
US importer credited with pressing Daimler-Benz to build the 300 SL and with initiating the design intervention behind BMW's 507. He later served as BMW's sole American distributor from 1962 until the factory took the network in 1975.
Max Hoffman was born Maximilian Hoffmann in Vienna on 12 November 1904. He raced motorcycles, then cars — an Amilcar and a spell as factory driver for Grofri, the Austrian licensed Amilcar — and around the age of thirty left the cockpit to import. Through Hoffmann & Huppert he became exclusive Austrian agent for Lancia, Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Alfa Romeo, Talbot and Vauxhall, and Volvo's first European importer.
After the Anschluss he moved the business to Paris, then in June 1941 sailed for New York. Passenger-car imports were impossible, so he manufactured metallized-plastic costume jewellery and used that capital to open the Hoffman Motor Car Company. The first Park Avenue showroom opened in 1947 with a single Delahaye. Within a year he was Jaguar's official US importer; he would eventually represent some twenty-one European marques.
As Mercedes-Benz's official importer from September 1952, he proposed a sports-car programme that led to the 300 SL Coupé. The board launched two sports cars in September 1953; the 300 SL and 190 SL appeared at New York's International Motor Sports Show on 6 February 1954. He then argued for the Roadster introduced in 1957. Mercedes ended the contract that year and passed US distribution to Studebaker-Packard.
For BMW, Hoffman rejected the 528 roadster prototype and asked Albrecht Graf von Goertz for new sketches, beginning the design work for the 507. His proposed 2,500-car order was repeatedly reduced, and he imported only 16 507s in 1957 and 1958. BMW ended the contract at the close of 1958.
Most factories had already left — Volkswagen in 1953, Jaguar in 1954, Mercedes in 1957. BMW brought him back as sole US distributor from March 1962 until 1975, when BMW of North America took over. In 1981 he fell ill in Bavaria, was flown back to the United States, and died on 9 August, aged 76.
Hoffman used his import business to argue that European manufacturers should develop cars around American buyers, including the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL and BMW 507. Mercedes launched the Coupé in New York in February 1954 for those buyers.
Mercedes' archive records that he had urged an open 300 SL from the start, seeing better American sales in a convertible. The factory presented the Roadster at Geneva in March 1957 and ended Gullwing production that spring.
Shown BMW's 528 roadster prototype in 1954, he called it unsaleable in America and asked Goertz, working in New York, to send sports-car sketches to Munich. Those drawings became the 507; Hoffman did not style the body.
The stations
The houses
Credited through Hoffman Motor Car Company.
In the register
The files above are the register's own record of this name. The people index holds everyone the register credits.
In their words
“I preferred the Porsche’s finish and workmanship, and the car’s handling was excellent. On the 1951 Mount Equinox Hillclimb, I drove a Porsche cabriolet over a course with two miles of snow at the end. I was so fast, Briggs Cunningham claimed my time was impossible and forced the organisers to make me drive it again.”
Max Hoffman · Porsche Newsroom, 2018, quoting Panorama magazine
