Many’s the automobile manufacture that has failed either because of unfavourable trading conditions or the fundamental weakness of its product, but in the case of the short-lived Michigan Motor Car Company it was the criminality of its directors that precipitated the firm’s demise.

The Michigan story had begun in 1904 when the Michigan Buggy Company, of Kalamazoo, motorised one of its carriages by fitting a 3½hp single-cylinder engine and sold the result for $450.

Michigan’s motorised buggy remained available for several years but it would be 1911 before the newly constituted Michigan Motor Car Company built its first ‘proper’ automobile.

Engineer W H Cameron (previously with Willys-Overland and Flanders) and coachwork designer John A Campbell were recruited to help produce Michigan’s new 40hp ‘four’, which was marketed, somewhat clumsily, as ‘A Mechanically Right and Right Priced Car Supreme in the Forty Field.’ Sadly, this soundly engineered, well-made and competitively priced car...