Illustrious readers - we need your help

Hi Michael, thanks for sharing this very nice picture of a common city scene in Paris. The car is a coupé de ville, a typical body type for private city use and in fact a small limousine. The car was registered end of 1910 or beginning 1911 in Paris. The bodywork is conventional with the body lines similar to the 19th century horse-drawn coupé. The step at the passenger's seat is used for placing any luggage on top of the car, and of course for reaching the spare tyres stored in the round box. Two small details are to be noticed: the siren, normally driven with a rubber belt and a friction-drive wheel at the flywheel, operated with a foot pedal; and the radiator ornament, which is unfortunately too vague to identify. It could be a Saint Christophe, but a better image is necessary to confirm.

Not the louvres or even the bonnet handgrips are useful identifying features on a Hotchkiss (you will find similar on Delaunay-Belleville models), but the rather narrow radiator core with the radiator filler tube with flat screw cap (Delaunay-Belleville always used the cap with the central pin: you could unscrew the cap by lifting the pin). And of course the straight bottom of the radiator, which is just visible.
The whole car indeed breathes England, with the high rounded dash (a typical British coachbuilding feature) and the Sankey wheels. not to forget the cleanshaven driver with his English chauffeur's cap. The lights are without doubt electric, as the air vent at the top is absent. Electric light was already available on cars from at least 1905 and the shape of the lamps hardly changed during the following decade. The shape however was make-dependent, so the front lights could be Blériot. On the basis of the whole picture I would date the car at 1912.

My impression is that Hotchkiss made cars with a rudimentary "torpedo" like the one in the photo between 1910 and 1912/13. I'm not sure whether the huge front-lights are electrical, already, but they provide little evidence regarding the date of manufacture of the car, anyway. Before WW1, both for- and six-cylinder engines were with maximum output ranging from 16 to 50 h.p. The car in the picture appears to be a 4-cylinder model rather than a six-cylinder.

Large Hotchkiss, c.1912. Unusual with Sankey wheels.

c1912 Hotchkiss, very similar to a resident Hotchkiss in Victoria, Aus.

I am not an expert on the make, but I believe it is a Hotchkiss. The hood louvers is the "giveaway". Seeing as it has electric head and side lights I am guessing about 1912 vintage. Looking forward to others with more knowledge of the make to fine tune the year.