Rolls-Royce V-8 (1905)

The Rolls-Royce V-8 was a car that Rolls-Royce produced in 1905 to compete with the then popular electric cars used in towns. Claude Johnson, business partner of C. S. Rolls, suggested there would be a market for an internal-combustion car that could take on the electric car market, which meant it had to be silent, vibrationless and smokeless, with the engine mounted under the car to give the look of a town brougham and so very shallow. The engine was a completely new design with smoothness and quietness as top priorities and power secondary. Its production predated by a decade the first mass production of a V8 engine, by Cadillac, and came only three years after Leon Levavasseur built the first V8 engine of any type, the Antoinette 8V aviation engine. Henry Royce designed the engine as a 90-degree, side-valve, 3,535 cc V-8.