Puma

Puma is a Brazilian car manufacturer which built cars from 1966 until roughly 1995. High import tariffs

effectively closed Brazil during much of this period to foreign-built cars. Puma sourced engines from DKW (3 cylinders), Volkswagen (4 cylinders) and General Motors (4 and 6 cylinder) mounted on their own chassis and Fiberglass body. Puma also made trucks, from 1978 to 1999. Returned in 2013 under the name of Puma Automobiles bringing the Puma 52 (made especially for tracks) and the Puma GT 2.4 Lumimari. The origin of what became the Puma was the DKW-Malzoni, built by Rino Malzoni of Matão in São Paulo (state) from around 1964. Malzoni was a keen auto racer, and at the behest of DKW-Vemag he developed a competition car based around a DKW straight-three two-stroke engine. Developed to compete with the Willys Interlagos, a locally built copy of the Alpine A108 which was outpacing DKW's heavier sedans, Malzoni developed a steel-bodied prototype.