- Founded
- 1922 – 1924
- Country
- Italy
Colombo (automobile) is the qualified catalog identity for the road vehicles of Officine Meccaniche Colombo in Milan, deliberately distinguished from Ercole Colombo's unrelated postwar motorcycle, Gioacchino Colombo the Ferrari engine designer, Gilberto Colombo's Gilco chassis work, and multiple industrial firms sharing the surname. Standard automobile references place the road-vehicle operation in 1922–24. The company is described as having been formed in 1922 for aircraft-engine work, although other technical heritage records associate the same or similarly named Milan workshops with Colombo-Combi D 110 aero-engine development as early as 1916 and later sources document Colombo S.53/S.63 aircraft engines in the late 1920s. Without a corporate archive that reconciles those names and dates, this history limits its founding and ending years to the Colombo automobile marque, not necessarily every later or predecessor engineering concern. At the 1922 Milan Motor Show the firm displayed a three-wheel delivery vehicle intended for short-distance work. No accessible record proves series manufacture, customer delivery or a surviving example, so that vehicle is cataloged as an exhibition/prototype Delivery Tricycle. Passenger-car production is reported from 1923. The sole named automobile was Tipo 9, using a 1,300 cc inline-four with overhead valves and an overhead camshaft, coupled to a three-speed gearbox. That layout was sophisticated for a small early-1920s car, but public sources preserve no output rating, bore and stroke, wheelbase, brake arrangement, bodies, dimensions, weight, speed, price, serial numbers, production total or survivor register. Automobile manufacture ended in 1924. Two rows therefore exhaust the defensible Colombo road range: the 1922 commercial tricycle exhibit and 1923–24 Tipo 9. Aircraft engines are company history rather than road models, and the unrelated 1947/1950 Ercole Colombo rotary-valve motorcycles receive a separate scope classification instead of being falsely linked by name.
Text adapted from “Colombo (automobile)” on Wikipedia ↗ · CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗