Horex Motorcycles

Horex was a German motorcycle manufacturer founded in 1923 by Fritz Kleemann in Bad Homburg, its name a blend of "Homburg" and "Rex," the trademark of his family's canning-glass company. Using Columbus-sourced engines, Horex built four-stroke singles and twins and became known in the postwar years for models like the Regina and Imperator. Declining sales ended motorcycle production in 1956, and the company's facilities were absorbed into Daimler-Benz by 1960. The brand lay dormant for decades until it was revived in 2010, when a new Horex GmbH unveiled the VR6 - built around a distinctive narrow six-cylinder engine - manufactured in Augsburg starting in 2011. That revival ran into financial difficulty and was restructured again in 2015. Horex today exists as a small-scale, intermittently active manufacturer trading on its historic name rather than a continuously operating mass producer.