Dana

Dana was a Danish automobile marque built in Copenhagen by the machine works of Hakon Olsen from 1908 to 1914. Sources render the proprietor's given name as Hakon, Haken or Håkon and the business as Maskinfabriken Dana or Maskinfabriek Dana; those are language and spelling variants of one maker, not separate brands. AllCarIndex independently records the same identity, dates and Copenhagen location. The company was one of a small group of Danish workshops producing cars in very limited quantities during the country's pioneering 1900–20 motor-industry period. Accessible histories do not preserve a street address, incorporation date, capitalization, workforce, dealer organization, annual statements or a production ledger. The end of car manufacture in 1914 is generally attributed to a shift in company priorities after the outbreak of the First World War, but no recovered board record or announcement proves a more specific closure event. Dana's best documented vehicle was the 6 HP Voiturette. It used an imported air-cooled Peugeot gasoline engine rated at six horsepower and carried an open phaeton body for two people. Published weight was only 260 kg. The transmission provided two forward speeds and reverse. No trustworthy source yet supplies the Peugeot engine's cylinder count, displacement, bore, stroke, ignition, carburetion or rated speed; nor are the clutch, final drive, brakes, steering, wheelbase, track, dimensions, tires, tank capacity, performance or price known. Those fields remain unset rather than being copied from another six-horsepower Peugeot application. A surviving encyclopedia summary says the Dana was built through the 1908–14 span with minor modifications, but does not identify model years or technical breakpoints. The catalog therefore represents the 6 HP as one continuous family and does not turn unspecified running changes into fabricated series. From 1912, its 260 kg weight satisfied the newly current cyclecar definition. That later classification did not create a new product: the same voiturette had existed since 1908, so it is not duplicated as a separate 1912 Cyclecar model. Importantly, an international automobile encyclopedia also says stronger Dana models were offered, while admitting that no details are known. That statement prevents a claim that every Dana automobile was the 6 HP, yet it supplies no names, ratings, bodies, engines, chassis codes or dates. One explicitly qualified Higher-Power Models aggregate consequently acknowledges that additional offering within the 1908–14 company span without inventing how many types existed. It does not inherit the 6 HP car's Peugeot engine, 260 kg weight or two-speed transmission. No exact output is known for either family, and no chassis list, registration sequence, model split or confirmed survivor census has been recovered. The marque is unrelated to the American Dana/Spicer drivetrain supplier, modern Dana-branded component systems, personal names and the Danish postwar Alfa Dana Formula 3 racing cars. Two rows—the specifically documented 6 HP Voiturette and the unresolved stronger offering—therefore exhaust what current evidence can defensibly say about Dana's automobile range.

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