This article was written and made possible by the owner Aaron Loveless of Loveless Performance.
Please Respect That This Item Is Not For Sale.

The mid 1950’s planted the seed of what was to become the Space-age era, and along with it a massive movement in obscure design. This carried its share of breakthroughs, but the gimmicks and marketing wanks were in a league of their own.

This is the Oberhausen W-2000, possibly the strangest automotive supercharger ever built. An electromechanical implement of speed. This centrifugal supercharger is powered by your serpentine belt, and a starter motor… at the same time. As the vehicle accelerates, the belt would spin a gearbox that drives an impeller, gradually increasing your manifold pressure as well as horsepower. Oberhausen decided this process would be more efficient with an electric motor thrown in the mix. Current fed from the battery would be dumped into the supercharger and (theoretically) raise the impeller speed to 40,000 RPM! This 8.25” pinwheel would subsequently ram 15PSI straight into your engine, producing miles of smiles following a 65% increase in power! Ok, this is a major stretch considering the 4HP starter motor and poor compressor tolerances, but Oberhausen still gets an A+ for style. This Flathead mounted Ray-Gun is unlike any other.

Oberhausen’s role in the supercharger world began in the mid 1950s and ended quickly. The first blower offered was the Oberhausen 500, a DIY kit consisting of a pile of castings, and a starter motor with machine-work required. The finished product was an intake mated to a fan marketed as the “Dragster Supercharger”, purely electric in design. A run of kits were sold before Oberhausen realized mechanically driven blowers possessed more potential. The company began producing a small line of mechanical, and hybrid electromechanical superchargers. It is uncertain how many units of each were produced. So far this Flathead W2000 is the only complete survivor we know of its kind. There are half a dozen documented purely-electric 500 models in the wild today, and that we know of, a single shaft-driven Oberhausen somewhere in Iowa that is missing pieces.

Oberhausen sold the W2000 assembled for a whopping $590, which is close to $6,000 in today’s money. The company’s sales dwindled, and was eventually absorbed by Turbonique, a company devoted to strapping rocket engines to cars, but that’s a story for another day.