After WW II Tatra's future became very uncertain because of the political situation in Europe. In February of 1945 a conference was held in Jalta, USSR, where representatives of the three allies - Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin - met to decide how to split up post-WW II Europe. CzechoSlovakia was given as one of the satellites to the USSR. This ment the Soviet Union would force their political system of Communism and a centralised planned economy on Czechoslovakia and its other satellites. Tatra now found itself stranded behind the iron curtain and at the mercy of the Communists. On top of this in 1945 Tatra's main automotive designer Hans Ledwinka was wrongly accused of collaborating with the nazis and imprisoned from 1945 to 1951 by the new Communist CzechoSlovakian government. After he was released in 1951 Ledwinka was offered to return to Tatra and run the factory, but he refused and returned to Austria, his home country.

Because of Ledwinka's imprisonment, the Tatra factory was now led by chief designer Ing. Julius Mackerle, a one-time pupil of Ledwinka, from 1946 onwards. Under his lead work started on a new type of passenger car which was to have the characteristics of the T87 but also become the successor of the very popular T57 and T57b. Initially there were plans to re-introduce the T97 which had been taken out of production by order after the German army had invaded the Czech Republic. The T97 however was a very expensive car to produce, so the Czech ministry would never allow these plans to be put into action. They did however support another plan which involved the development of a luxurious automobile with a V6-engine, based on the design of the T97. This idea never got further then a concept, but the next one was to be more of a success. A team consisting of ten designers proposed their idea of a car with a similar layout and size to the T97, but with a more modern design and parts more suited to mass-manufacture. After they got the OK from the Czech ministry they started to work very hard on the development of this new car throughout the winter of 1945. In 1946 the first prototype was ready, dubbed the "Ambroz". This prototype was given a very pure streamlined body with inclosed rear wheels, a split windscreen and tailfin.

Original Czech brochure for the T57B (1948) >>>

Engine of the Tatra T600 Tatraplan  (1951) >>>

In 1951 however the CZAL decided Tatra would produce only trucks and ordered for the entire production line of the T600 Tatraplan to be moved from Koprivnice to the Skoda plant in Mladá Boleslav. Out of protest to this ridiculous decision the workers at Tatra Koprivnice burried a complete T600 Tatraplan - coming straight from the production line - on the factory grounds. The relocation of the production to Skoda was something neither Skoda or Tatra were very pleased with. The Tatraplans manufactured at the Skoda-plant were only used for export purposes. The Skoda-built Tatraplan is recognisable by the different engine cover with bigger split rear-windows and a more rounded tail (where as the Tatra-built Tatraplan has smaller split rear-windows and a pointed tail).

Less than two years later, in 1952, - after 2100 Tatraplans had been built by Skoda - the production line was shut down completely. This ment there were no more Tatra passenger cars in production. A sad thought when you consider the thriving pre-WW II years with several models in a wide range of sizes and engine capacities. But with Tatra cars gone, there were also no more luxury cars being produced in CzechoSlovakia. For a while it seemed as if passenger car production had finished for good in Koprivnice, but the Tatra employees were still hoping and trying to start the development of a new big luxurious passenger car in the near future. In 1954 they did build one prototype of a small 3,7 m long two-door car fitted with a 750 cc 4-cylinder engine. This car got the type designation T604, but was never developed beyond this one prototype. Fortunately the Czech minister Vaclav Kopecky had a soft spot for Tatra cars and would try to use his influance in favour of the Tatra company. After some time he managed to pursuade the Czech Politburo to agree that Tatra would be allowed to build a limited number of big passenger cars for promotion purposes. Kopecky's lobying was helped by the fact that the Communist leaders discovered that the Russian limousines weren't capable enough compared to the fast, reliable and comfortable Tatra cars. They needed a new car. This was to be the Tatra T603.

Special versions of the Tatraplan were also built. These include the Tatraplan Diesel T600D, aluminium bodied Tatraplan Monte Carlo T601, Tatraplan ambulance and pick-up T201 (both with front-mounted engine and body made by the principles of the German aerodynamics engineer Kamm), Tatraplan convertible with Sodomka body (later given to Stalin for his birthday), Tatraplan Sport T602 and a standard T600 Tatraplan fitted with the T603 air-cooled V8-engine. The factory built T600 equipped with the T603-engine with one carburettor had a top speed of 176 kph and was the fastest automobile in Czechoslovakia in that time.

Original Czech advertising poster for the T600 Tatraplan (± 1950) >>>

Original advertising poster for the Skoda 1102 convertible: 'Natuurlijk Skoda' ('Naturally Skoda') by Dutch artist Jan Lavies for the Tatra and Skoda importer Auto Palace in The Hague, the Netherlands  (1951) >>>

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