by Vladimir Nekola
Tehuelche in Motormovil
At the beginning of 1960 Tehuelche was on its way to be manufactured in the Motormovil factory. This same factory imported “spare parts” of Legnano, Bicicletas Legnano, DEMM and Garelli. Tehuelche was the only bike that was completely created in Argentina, and that was the attraction point for Natalio Cortes, the owner of Motormovil. With the Tehuelche, he showed the government that he had a local product. By this time the government had become aware of the trickery with the importation of “spare parts” and was beginning to put an end to it by imposing various regulations. Cortes continued fighting this development with little success.



When the government passed legislation in 1962 stopping the importation of “spare parts”, there were still containers full of these parts sitting in the Buenos Aires port. So, foreign bikes continued to appear on the market resulting in tough competition for the Tehuelche. Eventually, foreign bikes disappeared from the market and this could have provided an advantage for the factory that produced a totally local motorcycle, and there was no marketing reason to stop production. It could have been one of the few bikes available. However, production was not profitable enough for Motormovil. The bike became obsolete – the engine was outdated; customers wanted something more durable and easier to fix, like the two-stroke engines found in the Puma Cuarta Serie (with a 125 Sachs engine). The Tehuelche was no more.

The Racing Competition
As mentioned, the Tehuelche prototype was born as a racing motorcycle; so when the bike hit the market later as a utilitarian machine, many customers immediately tuned their bikes for racing. The first recorded participation of a Tehuelche in a race was in November 1957 at the Buenos Aires racetrack. This was an international race for the 125 cc class. No record can be found about the performance of the Tehuelche in this race.






In 2024, 75 years after its first predecessor appeared, a motorcycle called Tehuelche stood out in one of the most important motorcycle events in Europe, the Motogiro d’Italia. This event consists of six stages covering 1600 kms. Three Tehuelches participated in this grueling event. They didn’t win any prizes or arrive first in any of the stages, but they did finish. In fact, they finished the race in admirable working state, something that cannot be said of many of the other bikes that participated, all of which were bigger, and many more modern than the Tehuelche. At 75cc it was the smallest displacement engine among the 180 participating bikes. Because the Tehuelche was from 1957, it entered the event in the most prestigious category, Rievocazione Storica (Historic Reenactment).








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Outside of PdO’s offerings … perhaps the best lost history article thats appeared here since I first started reading The Vintagent … high praise from one who is quite restrained in giving praise .. and well deserved I might add
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