Heinrich Kleyer established his cycle business in Frankfurt-am-Main in the 1880s and marketed his products using the Adler (eagle) name. By 1898 some 100,000 cycles been sold and in 1899 Adler began making motor tricycles under license from Max Cudell of Aachen who held the German patent rights for De Dion-Bouton designs.
Kleyer reputedly visited the Paris Motor Show in 1899 and was impressed by the layout of the little Renault voiturette with its front-mounted engine, in-line gearbox, and shaft drive to the back axle. When the first Adler car appeared in the middle of 1900 it was mechanically similar to the Renault in design and was the first German car to use such a layout. Powered by a De Dion-Bouton engine the car looked rather like that firm's vis-à-vis model. Two-cylinder cars soon followed and a four-cylinder model of advanced design was available from 1904.
Adler was to be at the forefront of volume production of front-wheel-drive cars with the introduction of the 'Trumpf' model in 1932.