Societé Générale des Voitures Automobiles Otto [SEP] dissolved or abolished
Societé Générale des Voitures Automobiles Otto
The Societé Générale des Voitures Automobiles Otto of Paris manufactured the Otto car from 1900 to 1914, and the F.L. from 1909 to 1914.
Otto.
The Otto part of the name was because the Compagnie Française de Moteurs à Gaz held the license for the Otto stationary engine for France. Early gas-engined cars were 2-cylinders of varying outputs between 6 and 12 horsepower. The engines were either vertically- or horizontally-opposed. In 1901, a 20 hp 4-cylinder model was added
-drawn coach with driver carrying two passengers that could be hired by the hour or by the distance of the trip. In 1900, there were about ten thousand fiacres in service in Paris; half belonged to a single company, the "Compagnie générale des voitures de Paris"; the other five thousand belonged to about five hundred small companies. The first two automobile taxis entered service in 1898, at a time when there were just 1,309 automobiles in Paris. The number remained very small at first; there were just eighteen