LuLu
Encyclopedia
The LuLu was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 automobile
Automobile
An automobile, autocar, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor...

 manufactured only in 1914. Billed as "more than a cyclecar
Cyclecar
Cyclecars were small, generally inexpensive cars manufactured mainly between 1910 and the late 1920s.-General description:Cyclecars were propelled by single cylinder, V-twin or more rarely four cylinder engines, often air cooled. Sometimes these had been originally used in motorcycles and other...

", it had a four-cylinder monobloc engine
Monobloc engine
A monobloc or en bloc engine is an internal-combustion piston engine where some of the major components: cylinder head, cylinder block, or crankcase are formed, usually by casting, as a single integral unit, rather than being assembled later...

 and three-speed gearing. It sold for $398.

The LuLu cyclecar was produced by the Kearns Motor Car Company. The company was founded by Charles Maxwell Kearns I in Beavertown, Snyder County, Pennsylvania
Beavertown, Snyder County, Pennsylvania
Beavertown is a borough in Snyder County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 870 at the 2000 census.-Geography:According to the United States Census Bureau, the borough has a total area of , all of it land....

about 1903. Kearns was the son of a buggy maker and had a gift for invention but little more than a grade school education. He began by first mounting an engine on a buggy and progressed to more elaborate designs and heavy trucks.

The company's logo underwent a series of changes during its existence. The first logo for the "Kearns Kar Kompany" frames the words in the outline of the grille of a 1907 runabout. The logo for the company boasted the car as being "Valveless, Gearless, and Clutchless" which was indeed true. The engine for the first vehicles was an air-cooled 3-cylinder "porcupine head" two cycle engine which the owner needed to prepare a mixture of fuel and oil in order to run. The vehicle's transmission was a friction drive, consisting of a flat spinning flywheel mounted on the engine which was set at right angles to a rubber lined steel drive wheel which slid from side to side on a drive shaft mounted in parallel to the rear axle. Sprockets on the end of the drive shaft relayed power to the rear wheels via a pair of chains, one per wheel. The friction drive was prone to slippage due to environmental conditions (water) and if the rubber drive wheel was allowed to rest against the spinning flywheel for a long period of time it would develop a flat spot which would produce an uneven power transfer. The transmission was infinitely variable, however, allowing the user to simply progressively slide the rubber covered wheel from a neutral position at the center of the flywheel to a position closer to the edge of the flywheel to obtain a lower gear ratio.

The introduction of the LuLu in 1914 marked a change in engineering for the vehicle. The two cycle engine was discarded in favor of the more reliable 4-stroke engine and a clutch and 3-speed transmission replaced the friction drive. World War I caused the company to cease production, however after the Great War the company resumed production but shifted to making mostly trucks, including fire trucks. A running 1923 Kearns fire truck is currently on display today in the city of New Town, Pennsylvania's firehouse. It was the city's first self driven fire truck and has won several awards.
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