British Light Cars

by DENNIS MAY

YOU don’t use a pile driver to sink a tee in the green. And by the same token, steadily mounting numbers of Americans and Canadians have swung over, during the past three years, to a logic-rooted appreciation of the British light car as a deputy for the family’s staple automobile. The putt-length journeys entailed in domestic marketing, the social round, and the delivery of husbands to and from daily commuters’ trains account for a lag percentage of most American families’ annual motoring mileage; and for such purposes the small English car appears to have nearly all the advantages and scarcely a disadvantage.

Gas consumption is low, as might be expected when an engine one third the size of a Ford V8’s is harnessed to a vehicle weighing around 2250 pounds, including fuel, water, and oil. Under AAA observation, a strictly stock Austin A40, with two occupants together weighing 415 pounds, plus substantial baggage, made the 514mile trip from New York to Toronto last May at an average of over 33.3 miles per U.S. gallon. An ordinary owner, driving to please himself and not to astound the AAA, may reckon on getting 27 to 30 to the gallon under typical highway conditions.

Cobby build makes for easy parking and maneuvering in traffic. A mean struck between the over-all lengths of the Hillman Minx and the Austin A40 comes out at 155 inches — 42 inches shorter than the average for low to medium priced American cars of today. Moderate frontal overhang, highish seat elevation, and close proximity of the driver’s eye to the windshield are factors giving a sense of security and command in the hurly-burly of city streets.

Try to sell a British car to an American or a Canadian and his first and most natural question is: “Yes, but what about parts?”

The answer, so far as big-scale producers like Hillman, Austin, British Ford, and the Nuffield group are concerned, is that he can set his mind at rest. The service given by small specialist manufacturers, exploiting the snob appeal of an exotic line in sport models, may leave something to be desired, and that is a risk the customer takes and presumably appreciates. But the big people, who were geared exclusively to war production from September, 1939, to VJ day, do not and will not commit the sin of sending fallible machinery across the ocean without an allocation of accurately matched parts.

Austin of Birmingham takes particular pride in its U.S. maintenance organization, and claims that any replacements order, no matter from what remote corner of the Union it may come, can be satisfied within twenty-four hours. The A40 having earned nearly 70 million dollars since its U.S. and Canadian debut just over three years ago, making it the United Kingdom’s star dollar-earning manufacture, bar nothing, Austin can of course afford to operate an elaborate and far-flung parts-setup. Or perhaps one should put it another way: if Austin is to redeem its vow to hold a permanent bridgehead in the North American markets, it can’t afford not to nourish the customer with abundant and ever available parts.

Today millions of Americans know the A40 and the Minx and the little Ford Anglia and Prefect by sight, but few are familiar with their main elements of design.

The A40, which has undergone no change worth recording, internal or external, since its launching in October, 1947, mounts a four-door sedan body on a cruciform-braced chassis with box-section side rails, coil springs for the knee-action front suspension, and reverse-camber laminated springs back aft. The overhead valve motor has four cylinders displacing 73.17 cubic inches and develops 40 horsepower at 4300 revolutions per minute. The four-speed synchromesh transmission, built in unit with the motor, unashamedly sprouts a long central shift lever of the type no longer fashionable, and drives the back axle through an open Cardan shaft.

With front and rear seat widths of 47 and 39 inches respectively, this Austin is hospitable to four adults but doesn’t seriously bid for more. The gearshift position precludes threesomes in fronts and the scat is divided down the middle and given separate fore/aft adjustment for the two halves, so a long-legged driver can, if he wishes, sit further back than his neighbor, or a short-legged one further forward.

Tread is 49 inches, wheel base 92 1/2, ground clearance 6 3/4, and gas capacity 10 U.S. gallons. With a compression ratio of 7.2 to 1, the A40 will make around 72 m.p.h. on American premium grades of gasoline, and 2 m.p.h. less on pooled Brilish fuel. It accelerates from zero to a mile a minute in 37 seconds. Delivered price in New York is $1539.

Launched a year later than the Austin, the Hillman Minx is less distinctively British in appearance, following the body form pioneered in America and copied, for better or worse, the world over. In this case the chassis and body are of integral construction and the motor has an L-head in place of overhead valves, but the transmission and springing systems repeat the Austin themes. Having 49 inches of front seat span — 2 inches more than the A40 — and its shift lever up on the steering column, the Hillman makes room for two passengers alongside the driver, if they are not too gesticulatory.

The 77 cubic inch engine yields 38 horsepower for 4200 r.p.m., gives pickup from nothing to 00 an hour in 39 seconds, peaks at 67 m.p.h. on the level, and just about, matches the Austin’s gas consumption. The New York delivered price is $1495.

In the low to medium power and price field, two entirely new British Fords stole the London automobile show List October. These cars, the four-cylinder Consul and the Zephyr six (the latter exhuming a name buried by Lincoln some years back), have not yet started to come off the line. First Consul deliveries in America are expected in March, Zephyrs following about two months later. U.S. prices are not settled at this writing, hut spectacularly competitive figures are predicted. Meanwhile the little Anglia and Prefect four-seat sedans, simplest and cheapest British cars in their two classes, continue to do steady U.S. business at $1080 and $1215 delivered in New York.

Although unreservedly American in the styling, of their slab-flanked sedan bodies, the new English Fords share practically no engineering features with the parent product. Identical in many dimensions, and only to be told apart by a small difference in frontal fencework, the Consul and the Zephyr have been schemed for optimum interchangeability of components, and thus maximum economy in manufacture and ease of servicing. Even the bores and strokes of the cylinders are uniform at 3.09 and 2.96 inches respectively; but whereas the smaller, with four cylinders, displaces 92 cubic inches, the six goes 138 cubic inches.

From the bore/stroke measurements it will be seen that Ford’s Dagenham design team is well abreast of the times — and ahead of Austin and Hillman — in building its engines “shorter than square,” and so presenting the largest possible piston area for a given capacity. This technique, combined with the good “breathing” afforded by largediameter overhead valves, operated through pushrods and rockers, results in an output of 47 horsepower for the Consul and 68 for the Zephyr. By calculation (neither model has yet been subjected to independent road test) the Zephyr’s all-round performance should about equal the much-larger-engined (223 cubic inches) V8’s, the former offsetting a 20 horsepower deficit with lighter weight and reduced wind drag.

A Ford switch to overhead valves makes automotive news in any language, of course. I alike all Fords hitherto produced in the United Kingdom, these newcomers have integral ehassis-cum-body construction and independent suspension for the front wheels, on long coil springs. With a seat width beating the competition by an average of 4 inches, the Consul brings comfortable riding for six into what we in Britain think of as the 1 1/2 liter bracket (that is. 1500 cubic centimeters engine capacity, equal to 91 1/2 cubic inches) for the first time. In line with Ford custom, Consul and Zephyr have three-speed transmissions, as against the four speeds otherwise universal in Britain, but the steering column shifts are new.

When eventually the freshman Fords start reaching the home market in quantity — which won’t be for a long time yet — they will, I think, produce a revolution in our motorists’ attitude towards the ultraresilient suspension which Americans have for years not merely accepted but demanded. Here this drowsy springing has been associated with dangerously excessive roll on corners and pitch on uneven surfaces, but now, by my reading of the blueprint, Ford’s Dagenham savants hav e devised a layout which will combine almost roll-free cornering and pitchless straightaway riding w ith featherbed comfort.

It is estimated that 83 per cent of American-owned British light cars play a second-string role (or third, or sometimes fourth even); they share a garage, that is to say, with at least one higher powered American car. This, in the nature of things, is not surprising, but it may — and I believ e does — have the effect of misleading Americans as to the capacity of these wiry bantams for hard work and punishment.

In New York and neighboring states some months ago I met Minx and A40 owners who seldom touched sixty miles an hour and, rather than suffer the boredom of cruising for hours in the low fifties on highways designed to be safe at judicious nineties an hour, would defer any journey of upwards of 200 miles until the firststring ear was available.

English constructors, far from encouraging such restraint, have gone out of their way to demonstrate their products’ disdain of high-stress operating conditions. Last May, for example, a standard A40 sedan, picked at random from a Brooklyn dealer’s showroom by AAA officials, set 36 I .S. stock car records at West hampton, L.L, averaging better than 64 m.p.h. for nineteen hours, at which stage the still hale Austin was crippled in a collision with a berserk deer.

This run, made over an unbanked, mullicornered airfield perimeter, which is a very different thing from a racetrack, was witnessed by a number of newspapermen and automotive writers, myself among them. Also present were several hard-bitten Indianapolis race veterans, plus a platoon of American Automobile Association functionaries.

The race drivers and AAA men were impressed to the verge of incredulity. If was gratifying to distance that all sorts and conditions of Americans were interested in British automobiles, had views about them, and were bursting open at the seams to ventilate these views.

For two, three, four years, the technical press in England has been campaigning for transmissions that will think. If two-pedal control is desirable on U.S. cars, with their big easygoing motors, they are next door to a necessity on British ones, lower powered and thus less flexible. My guess was that Ford of Dagenham would take the plunge while it was in its plunging mood, but no. Now, all the 1951 designs are disclosed and there isn’t a volitional transmission among them. So that makes it at least one more year we have to wait.