CVI

CVI—written C.V.I. in its own era—was the automobile marque of the C.V.I. Motor Car Company of Jackson, Michigan. Standard histories date organization to October 1906 with $100,000 capital; period coverage confirms the capitalization and says the company was formed to exploit a six-cylinder touring-car design by Charles D. Cutting, then credited with six years of motor-car design experience. Later references explain the badge as C for Cutting plus VI, the Roman numeral six, while the factory-era trade journal itself repeatedly calls the car the Cutting Six. The name therefore describes the six-cylinder design and must not be expanded into the four-cylinder reading repeated by some modern summaries. The first Cutting Six was road-tested in February 1907. It did not become a separate catalogued 1907 model: Cycle and Automobile Trade Journal says the C.V.I. made its first public exhibition at the Chicago show in December 1907 and frames the sale program and illustrated car as the 1908 C.V.I. The company built a new Jackson factory and intended to proceed carefully, planning only about fifty cars for 1908. That number was a forecast, not proof of completed output. A later Jackson manufacturing history says only five cars were built and describes the 1907 financial depression as discouraging management, whereas standard marque histories say the real total is unknown. No serial register, annual statement or survivor census has been recovered, so neither fifty nor five is presented as an exact production total. The entire evidenced range used one common 117-inch-wheelbase chassis. Customers could order a three- or four-passenger runabout, a five-passenger touring car or a seven-passenger touring car, each priced at $4,000 with five lamps, mats, horn and tools; a Cape top cost another $150. These were body choices on one chassis, not three unrelated models. The January 1908 period specification is unusually detailed. Its six water-cooled cylinders were cast as three paired units with valves on opposite sides, twin camshafts and a six-throw crankshaft. Four-inch bore and five-inch stroke give 377.0 cubic inches, about 6,178 cc, and the journal rated it at 30 hp at 1,000 rpm. Aluminum was used for the crankcase and oil sump; lubrication combined splash with a mechanical oiler; ignition combined storage battery and coils with a Bosch magneto. This evidence supersedes Wikipedia's internally inconsistent claim of a four-cylinder 4.2-litre engine. Some later compilations call the car Model A or 40 HP, but the recovered factory-era report uses neither Model A nor 40 as a model designation and states 30 hp at 1,000 rpm. The catalog therefore uses the contemporary C.V.I. Six-Cylinder Chassis identity and preserves Model A/40 only as a later-reference alias. A leather-faced cone clutch with cork inserts fed a selective sliding gearbox with three forward speeds and reverse. A propeller shaft with universal joints and bevel gearing drove a divided Garford rear axle. The chassis used 56-inch track, 10.5-inch ground clearance, half-elliptic front and full-elliptic rear springs, external and internal rear-wheel brakes, and extensive Hess-Bright and F&S ball bearings. Period weight was 2,600 lb for the touring car and 2,550 lb for the runabout. The same journal recounts a December demonstration from Chicago's Armory through a driving snowstorm. It praised the six-cylinder car's ability to crawl smoothly in high gear through congested streets and return rapidly into the storm, useful contemporary evidence that the illustrated chassis was operable rather than merely an exhibition mock-up. Accounts agree that investors withdrew by the end of 1908 and the CVI venture ended. The premises and personnel connection led to the Clarke-Carter concern and the cheaper Cutting automobile, but that 1909–13 four-cylinder marque is a successor identity, not a CVI continuation model. CVI's defensible output taxonomy is consequently one 1908 mechanical model with three open body configurations. The February 1907 experimental chassis remains in history; no closed body, truck, second engine, additional factory model code, post-1908 CVI or unrelated modern use of the initials is admitted.

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