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When the Carriage Became a Car: The 1913 Renault Type DG Victoria Rothschild

Randy Rusk · 2026-09-22T03:13:10Z

There are early automobiles that look like primitive versions of the cars that followed, and then there are cars like the 1913 Renault Type DG Victoria Rothschild, which seem to belong equally to the age of the horse-drawn carriage and the emerging automobile. Introduced in 1913, the Type DG was part of Renault’s developing luxury range and shared its chassis and much of its mechanical architecture with the earlier Type CB. Its “Victoria” body style was directly descended from the elegant four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage of the same name. The layout makes that heritage unmistakable. The chauffeur sat high and exposed at the front, almost exactly where a coachman would have been positioned, while passengers rode in considerably greater comfort on a cushioned rear bench. A lowered chassis made entering the passenger compartment easier. The coachwork was entrusted to the Rothschild workshops, drawing on a carriage-building tradition that Renault says already stretched back more than a century. Beneath that wonderfully eccentric body was a 2.6-liter four-cylinder engine rated at 12 CV, with the Type DG capable of about 40 mph. But specifications hardly convey what makes this car memorable. With its towering chauffeur’s perch, abbreviated front bodywork, enormous wheels, and comparatively low passenger compartment, the Victoria Rothschild captures a fascinating transitional moment when automakers were still figuring out what an automobile should look like and sometimes simply adapted the forms of the carriage age to the new mechanical era. That unusual shape is exactly what drew me to the new 1:43-scale version from Evrat Miniatures. Evrat has reproduced the 1913 Renault Type DG Victoria Rothschild as part of its line of wonderfully obscure historic vehicles, including versions depicting the distinctive Victoria body. It certainly isn’t a conventionally beautiful automobile, but that is part of its appeal. I’ve built my collection around notable cars throughout automotive history, and the Type DG represents an especially interesting moment in that story where the carriage was becoming the automobile, but designers hadn’t completely left the old world behind. Once I saw this wonderfully strange Renault in miniature, I knew I had to add it to the collection.