Steyr

The history of Steyr

Steyr made rifles before it made tractors, and the tractor business was the last part of it to be sold.

The origin is a gun factory founded at Steyr by Leopold Werndl in 1830. His son Josef continued it from 1869 as the Österreichische Waffenfabriks AG. Armaments gave way to bicycles from 1894 and to cars after 1918, and from 1923 the firm traded as Steyr-Werke AG.

Steyr-Daimler-Puch itself was a merger: Austro-Daimler with Puchwerke in 1928, and the Steyr works joining in 1934. During the Second World War armaments dominated again, with around 32,000 employed and new factories built at Graz-Thondorf and at St. Valentin in Lower Austria.

By the mid-1960s one company was making the Puch 500, lorries, cross-country vehicles, tractors, farm machinery, roller bearings, hunting weapons, motorcycles, bicycles and tools, with about a third of it exported. The Haflinger and the Pinzgauer came from there. So did the Puch G, which is the same vehicle as the Mercedes G and built in the same Graz plant; it was sold under the Mercedes-Benz name because Steyr-Daimler-Puch's own dealer network was far smaller.

From 1980 it was Austria's third-largest industrial company with some 17,000 employees. Restructuring cut that to 8,900 by 1991, and the group was taken apart piece by piece. Small-arms production was spun out as Steyr Mannlicher in 1987; the same year the Puch bicycle marque went to Bianchi in Italy, later part of Cycleurope of Sweden, and the roller-bearing business to SKF. The lorries went to MAN from 1989. In the 1990s the rest followed: the tractors to Case-IH in 1996 and later CNH, the buses to Volvo, and the heavy weapons business through a management buy-out in 1998 that passed to General Dynamics in 2003.

Written from Traktorenlexikon: Steyr, Wikibooks, CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 2026-09-14. Our words, not the source's.