Car-Nation
automobile manufacturer
The Car-Nation (also known as Carnation) was a brand of automobile manufactured in Detroit, Michigan, by the American Voiturette Company from 1913 to 1914.
The Car-Nation roadster was an 1,100 lb (500 kg) cyclecar costing $495. The vehicle had a four-cylinder Herreshoff "25" engine and a three-speed transmission.
Car-Nation also manufactured a larger four-seat Tourer model with a base price of $520. They also advertised a fore-and-aft tandem; it's not known if more than a few prototypes were produced. Two roadsters and five touring cars are known to survive.
In 1912, former Pope-Toledo manager Forrest Keeton moved his Keeton Towncar Works into a factory in Wyandotte, Michigan, a city south of Detroit on the shore of the Detroit River, and formed the Keeton Motor Company. He began construction of his first “French-like” car, the big Renault-influenced, air-cooled Keeton. It sold well enough to allow Keeton in 1913 to launch a second line of continental-influenced, low priced cars under a new name: Car-Nation. All that activity apparently attracted the attention of oil magnate Charles Schaeffer, and shortly after the introduction of the new car, the short-lived Car-Nation Motorette Co.
The public source identifies “Car-Nation” as automobile manufacturer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Car-Nation, automobile and manufacturer.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1035232. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1913, 1914 and 1912.
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This entry incorporates text from “Car-Nation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.