Škoda Independent Service

From Bicycles to a National Carmaker

Škoda is inseparable from Mladá Boleslav, the Czech town whose development it has shaped — its works cover more than a third of the town's area.

The company was born in 1895 out of a shared passion for bicycles: the technician Václav Laurin and the bookseller Václav Klement began building machines of their own design, branding them 'Slavia' in the patriotic spirit of the age. Motorcycles followed in 1899, successfully enough to win racing championships, and from 1905 the pair turned step by step to automobiles. Their first Laurin & Klement car was a success and later became a Czech classic; the firm became a joint-stock company in 1907 and produced for the armed forces during the First World War.

In the 1920s the growing company needed a strong industrial partner, and its 1925 merger with the Škoda works of Pilsen brought the Laurin & Klement marque to an end. The German occupation of 1939 to 1945 forced a long pause, and after the war the firm was nationalised as AZNP, becoming a state monopoly for political and economic reasons.

Traditional production methods carried the company for another two decades before output fell behind the new technologies of the West. The Favorit of 1987 brought renewal, and in 1990 the government chose partnership with Volkswagen: on 16 April 1991 Škoda became the group's fourth brand, after Volkswagen, Audi and SEAT.