Lou Horowitz never completely succeeded in his bid to launch and sustain a fledgling automobile company. The Playboy Motor Car Corporation of Buffalo, N.Y., wound up suffering the same fate that countless other car companies experienced in the first half of the 20th century. It was a noble and brave attempt with plenty of promise, but in the end the time, place and market weren’t quite right.
Horowitz’s grandson David Kaplan is certainly doing his part to make sure his grandfather’s vision and efforts are not forgotten, however. He has become an expert on the history of Playboy cars and owns five of them — including two of the most important of the 98 cars built: a 1947 prototype and Playboy #97, the last car built before the venture folded.
Kaplan remembers finding information about his grandfather’s company in an old briefcase in his parents’ basement when he was a kid. His interest in the cars took off when his parents traveled to New Jersey to buy Playboy #83, which he now owns. Things really got serious, he says, when he took a trip to Massachusetts and ran into an unexpected opportunity that was too good to pass up. “By that point I had started to research it more and … and I. knew guy in Bellingham, Mass. that had a bunch of cars. In 1989 my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and I went on vacation to Boston … I got a hold of guy, introduced myself and said I’d like to visit … So we ended up visiting and I thought we’d be there for like a an hour or so. We ended up spending the entire day there. He was an original dealer back in ’48, and throughout the years when he saw one for sale he could buy in and he had a collection going.”
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