(first posted 11/5/2012) Oooh, what a cute little car. Indeed it is, if the pygmy look is your thing; however, on its skinny little tires this A40 carries the weight of some pretty serious financial world history, as in our recurring balance-of-trade deficits. Seriously. This Austin was the first imported car to be bought in significant numbers immediately following WWII; as such, it was a godsend to postwar Great Britain, helping bail that nation out of the horrible debt load that was the cost of winning the war–and in the process, pioneering an overwhelming import boom that continues today. Was the cute little A40 an economic Trojan Horse?
That’s not exactly what crossed my mind when I happened upon this charming little sedan sitting on the curb. Even this photo makes it difficult to put this car’s diminutive size into perspective; the camera makes it look much larger than it really is, the same way it does with models and actresses. The Austin designers cleverly made it look more like a late-30s big Plymouth than a similarly-sized VW Beetle.
It sits tall, partly because it follows the traditional and venerable Anglo-American preference for body-on-frame (BOF) construction. Actually, that very tallness allows a quartet of adults to sit in reasonable comfort despite the car’s old-school architecture.
With few exceptions, English cars followed the same conservative development path as those from Detroit, at least until the radical Mini appeared in 1959. While many continental designers spent the ’20s and ’30s exploring such radically new approaches as rear engines, unibodies and sleek aerodynamics, the British generally preferred plodding along with three-quarter-scale Fords and Plymouths.
The A40, known as a Devon in four-door form and a Dorset in two-door guise (TuDorset?), appeared in 1947 as Austin’s first new post-war saloons. They proudly featured a “fully independent front suspension”, but the combination of a short wheelbase and semi-elliptic sprung solid rear axle resulted in a ride that was anything but superb, BOF and everything else aside. This is where the VW Beetle really shone: Its rigid unibody and long-travel four-wheel independent suspension were light years ahead of the flexible frames and hard suspensions found in the bucking little British cars of the day. But of course the British industry passed on the VW when it was offered to them after the war. Wouldn’t that have changed history if they hadn’t?
But the A40 did sport at least an OHV engine under its cute little hood, provided you could find it down in there, unlike most American cars of the time. Its 1200cc four was an OHV evolution of the pre-war flathead four. And it looks quite a bit like the B-series four that replaced it. That’s because its block was too short to be bore out any further, so the bore centers were increased to create the B-series. That marked the beginning of a long and illustrious run for the B-block engine, which would power not only millions of Austins and other BMC/BL cars, but also most postwar MG models, from the TC through the MGB. Will a British history buff please tell us when the last B-block car was built?
In the Devon/Dorset twins, the 1,200-cc pushrod OHV four generated 40 hp–not a bad figure at the time–and Austin claimed it would hit 70 mph and get up to 28 mpg (of course, at a much lower speed). According to Motor magazine, it trundled from zero-to -60 in exactly 37.2 seconds, if one must know.
So let’s get back to the A40′s role in global economics. Great Britain may have won the war, but it was practically bankrupt afterward–and no, the Marshall Plan wasn’t created for the winners. There was, as always, only one honest way to get out from under a mountain of crushing debt: Export, export, and export. So Austin sent the A40 to the U.S. at prices guaranteed to generate buyer interest and bring in hard dollars; and to help it along, did all it could to make it look as big as an American car in the ads. That is not truth in advertising.
Apparently the approach worked all the way to Halsey, Oregon. In 1951, this Austin found a home there with a thrifty mill worker, who spent his savings to help bail out the British Treasury and then drove his purchase for almost twenty years. It eventually was restored some years back, then sat as a static display in front of a car shop for decades. It’s now the proud possession of a lucky guy whose garage also contains a pristine MG TD that he bought new when he was a young man. And since I shot this, it’s moved on into new hands.
This Austin is lucky just to have survived. Due to their super-short wheelbase and light weight, most of these ended up as highly-modified dragsters in the ’60s–especially the two-door Dorset, which constituted only a small fraction of the roughly 450,000 A40s produced until 1952, when they were succeeded by the A40 Somerset.
Austin was undoubtedly the best-selling import of the early ’50s, and it maintained a prominent place throughout the remainder of that decade despite eventually losing the sales crown to VW, whose sales in the US exploded starting in 1955. In the ’60s, Austin’s passenger cars suffered strong sales declines, as only MGs and Austin-Healeys continued to generate cash. By the early ’70s it was over; the marque’s two final and desperate duds were the Austin America (1100) and the Marina. Incredibly, the Marina was still using the B-block engine, and its crude suspension wasn’t much of an improvement over the A40′s, but it didn’t matter; long before, Austin had acquired a rep for horrendous reliability that still stuck.
By that time, Americans were sending their dollars in a different direction anyway. Ironically, some were spent on Datsuns, whose engine designs had been licensed from Austin.
Today, economists tell us a key to solving our own trade and debt imbalance is to export more goods. And what should they be? I’ll bet this Devon would fetch a handsome price in London. (Update: maybe not so much so since the vote on Brexit)
Love the tiny people in the ads. Car should have a person or something to give it a proper scale. Just because the B-series engine only made 40 hp, doesn’t mean that it didn’t have weeping/seeping head gaskets & cracking heads.
Show the lhd shift linkage- it’s hilarious.
I think the drag car is an English Ford.
Oops’ wrong picture; fixed.
Same engine problems the Datsun suffered from, yet the Datsun (1.3L) made 67hp instead of 40, and was overall much more reliable. My ’66 Datsun PL411 cracked its head and spun a rod bearing, discovered at the same time. To be fair, it was 15 years old at the time.
To my eyes, the side view looks like this car was designed from front to back.
The designer started with a nice long hood and sweeping front fender line, but things start to get cramped at the rear door, and get more desparate the further back he got until he couldn’t even match the rear fender opening to the wheel, and totally runs out of room at the trunk!
Reminds me of my early days of drafting on paper, if you didn’t plan your drawing and went off the paper you had to start over, so better make it fit…
The car looks a bit like a Sharknose Graham that got shrunken in the wash.
It is so interesting to me the societal traits taken on by a nation’s cars. Where the German cars were over-engineered and overbuilt, paying not so much attention to looks, and where the French cars were soft and comfy, and where Italian cars were high strung and fast, and American cars were bold and brash, British cars were CONSERVATIVE.
This postwar 1950-ish Austin is 2/3 the size of the 1936 Chevy we recently discussed, but with only half of the power. I can see where these had little appeal – a nation that had spent the 1930s with 6 cylinder Chevys and Plymouths and 8 cylinder Fords, just why would this be appealing? Same car, but less of it than we were used to?
I am not well enough versed on the tax systems of the UK of the 1930s forward, but I would suspect that there were some policies in place that hobbled Great Britain vis a vis other European nations. Or could there have been a “traditionalist” mindset that was happy with what had always been? I look forward to hearing from some of our UK commentators about this car and the circumstances that brought it about.
If you’re looking for political reasons for this Paul’s already spelled them out in the article… I started trying to expand on them but Andrew Marr does a much better job in his “History of Modern Britain” – so here’s a YouTube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lurGssKn7PA
or you can jump to to the pertinent section (first 5min of this chunk):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PBvCvIFrgI
…assuming it’ll play over there. The whole series is well worth a watch if you can get it and are at all interested in C20th history.
The long and short of it is that the conditions which “hobbled Great Britain” relative to the rest of Europe as you put it, were in no small part due to our massive war debt to the US and the associated external economic control which went along with it.
With all that as a background it’s easy to see why the post-war A40 and its ilk were hastily cobbled together from a mix of pre-war tech, and some spit-and-string ingenuity, and bundled onto ships heading West as fast as they could be built.
I know this isn’t what you meant, but British road taxes at that time strongly encouraged carmakers to design undersquare engines.
Time honored method BOF construction NO Austin was alone in using prewar car building methods on a new car this late, most UK car makers of popular models switched to unitary construction Ford still made a couple of 30s leftovers butv the rest of the industry was modernising fast. These Austins had a massive chassis considering the size of the car certainly not flexible and these cars had quite soft suspension, Have you actually driven one of these Paul? RocknRoll handling was the order of the day in an Austin A40 they drove like a marshmallow as did everything else. Cars like Ford Zodiacs won rallies because they were tough and unitary built unlike the awful junk like Falcons from the US that just fell apart. Austins kept going under fairly harsh treatment that would leave american cars in the scrapyard.
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They were still common on the roads of Australia well into the seventies.
Standard used a chassis on the Phase 1 and 2 Vanguard as well. But yeah, everyone else was unitary in the Big Six’s (Ford, Vauxhall, Austin, Morris, Standard, Hillman) family sedans. More expensive cars were often BOF though.
It’s interesting to compare it with the Morris Minor made from 1948 to 1971 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Minor (around 1954, Morris and Austin merged together)
The Morris Minor was a size smaller and much more advanced with unitary build torsionbar front suspension but a prewar engine. The Minor gained a very brittle Austin A series engine after the merger but went on to be an iconic car. The Marina was really an upgraded Minor still using the A series engine and Minor front suspension in fact the only use Marinas have is to retrofit disc brakes into MMs. The B & O engines made it into the Marina but the vast majority had the 1300cc A block. Morris Minor vans were built unti 75.
The Minor effectively got rebodied in the late 50s as the Morris Major in Australia, but Britain only used that body for the Wolseley 1500 and Riley One Point Five, and kept the Minor in production. In Australia the Major was extremely popular and went through several facelifts.
The Marina was effectively a second rebody of the Minor platform. In Australia it had the OHC E-series engines, but never really took off as the Japanese did everything better.
These were quite a popular car in Canada when they were new. You’d still see the odd one around in Victoria in the ’70s, usually driven by ex-pat brits it seemed. I remember a story my Dad telling me that due to some sort of defect that was not economical to repair the Canadian importer loaded up a shipment of brand new a-40s onto a barge and dumped them in English Bay off of Vancouver. I always scoffed at the story, but it turns out to have been true. There are even pictures on the net if you surf around a bit.
Imagine doing a thing like that today.
I heard the same story from a co-worker who is from Vancouver Island. And yes these little cars were plentiful across the country and certainly in Edmonton and Calgary. I saw one for sale on Kijiji perhaps year ago being touted as an “easy restoration.”
Had a friend that had one of these only with engine, trans out of a wrecked Volvo 122. Went like stink!!
Am not familiar with this car but have had several friends with Morris Minors. Was wondering if a V6 (your choice/ford/buick/etc) wouldn’t make it a great fun car. Reading Nvanbccan’s comment I think a Nissan/Toyota truck 4 would be plenty. Had a friend with an early 2.2 carburated Datsun with three speed auto. Would make either this Austin or the Minor fly.
Looks like those wipers would leave a blind spot in front of the driver.
There was many moons back in my home town a A40 pickup with Holden 186cube powertrain bloody fast car had a 3 inch topchop fats all round
So, was Austin’s ability to sell this tall, stodgy car in America a factor in leading Hudson to believe we would buy Jets? Because really, this looks like what a Jet would be if designed on a Forties rather than Fifties styling theme.
A big reason that these cars, and their competitors sold during the 40’s and early 50’s is that you had a generation that had just come back from the war, lived thru the 30’s when there wasn’t all that much difference between cars in what was available to the masses, and these folks were ready to try something different. Maybe it would end up not making a whole lot of sense, but it was different and society was in the mood for different. Chalk it up to the exuberance of the victors, among other reasons.
Of course, after a few years, reality set in and people started realizing how well a lot of these cars fit into American traffic conditions. Not well. And by the late 50’s, the foreign ranks started thinning.
I’m willing to bet that a lot of these, as well as Triumph Mayflowers, and various other sedan were bought by WWII vets who served in England, drove their predecessors and liked them, and jumped at the chance to get one of their own. Unfortunately, those years driving in England (where the cars were perfect for the distances and the roads) clouded them to the different driving conditions in America. Big weakness of one of these cars (and their competitors, from any country, other than the Beetle) was that to drive one from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia in one day would probably kill the car. It couldn’t take the speed/distance combination necessary to make the trip.
to drive one from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia in one day would probably kill the car
Interesting point… I looked it up for context and discovered the distance Pittsburgh to Philadelphia is roughy the same as London to Newcastle (or almost exactly 3/4 the distance London to Edinburgh).
Certainly neither would have been a casual journey for anyone in 1950s Britain, but all the same I don’t know if they would have been unheard of journeys to make… Sure the British Motorways hadn’t yet been built, but then again Eisenhower’s Interstate Highways Act wasn’t until 1956 either…
Both my UK routes would have been along the A1 (the main North-South arterial pre-Motorway road in the UK) which had existed for 30 years by 1951 and by that time would have had many of its most significant bypasses in place, making it a fairly straight-through, and in places high speed (for the era) road.
Dad recalls childhood (early 50s) journeys from Liverpool to south Wales (or 1/3 Pittsburgh to Philadelphia) as being “long” but west of the Pennines that would have been on completely different roads than my imagined comparison… I’ll have to ask him whether he thinks London-Newcastle (or even London-Edinburgh) would have been an unthinkable car journey back then or not.
Makes me wonder anyway if the difference in distances is really as great as we think it was?
Back then, you’d have made half the trip of the not quite so new Pennsylvania Turnpike, speeds running in the 60’s. And American speed limits were faster than England’s by 5-10mph. Run that over an 8-10 hour period, plus the much higher stressed long-stroke British engine, and you had a recipe for disaster.
Yup – I ran the scenario past my parents (who were both kids then, but old enough to have an educated sense of what was and wasn’t a reasonable journey) and they both laughed – you’re quite right – it wouldn’t have been a car journey people would have considered doing in a day in 1950s Britain.
Dad especially recalled his father taking them to Wales in the late 50s in their new-to-the-family (but second hand) 1956 Morris Isis (which had replaced a 30s Isis as their family car) and the family egging him on to go faster. He hit the giddy heights of 60mph on a particular stretch of the A55 and the family were all greatly impressed… until a few days later the engine gave out!
Re speed limits, there was no official maximum speed limit on the open roads of Britain at this time, beyond the broad requirement to drive at a speed “reasonable” for the conditions. The limiting factor, of course, was what most cars of the day could achieve. But by the time the M1 motorway was opened at the end of the decade, it could be used as a testing ground for those with fast, powerful cars, since so long as it was reasonably clear it was quite legal to drive as fast as the car would allow. “Doing the ton” (i.e. 100 mph) became something of a target for those inclined toward speed, and the younger set with their tuned up cars and motorcycles became known as the “ton-up boys.”
The national 70-mph speed limit was finally introduced as a trial at the end of 1965, and made permanent in 1967, applying to both motorways and all other open highways.
I have a faded old snap of me (5 or 6 years old) standing clutching my model sailboat in front of family friend’s A40. I have absolutely no memories of riding in the car but I do have memories of destinations achieved in it particularly sailing on the Gareloch beside the US nuke sub base.
alistair
My father had one of these as his first car in 1950- it was a Australian market only Tourer.
These cars were common when I was growing up in 50’s London, and I always thought they were dogs ( I still think Beetles are dogs too ). Contemporary Fords and Vauxhalls were preferable, as were Morrises which had better suspension and steering.
Regarding the MG connection, I thought the first MG with a “B” series engine was the MGA – the TC/TD/TF all used Morris or MG engines.
uhmm…there’s something seriously wrong with this car’s proportions…
The A40 was a shrunken A70 Hampshire
Will a British history buff please tell us when the last B-block car was built?
hmmm…
http://www.aronline.co.uk/blogs/the-cars/morris-marinaital/engines-b-series/
hard to say. It looks like the 1975 “ADO17” (most commonly badged as Austin/Leyland Princess) were the last to get a B-Series engine, but the successor engines (O-Series and later M-Series) are so closely related that you could argue that “B block” engines were still in use into the early 90s.
In the US, the MGB was still available until the 1980 model year with the 1.8l B-series. I would be surprised if that was actually the last one, though… seems like there must be something more obscure out there.
I think you’ve nailed it. The last MGB in 1980 would be the end of the “B” series.
Ah-ha!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustan_Ambassador#Engines
The original B-series soldiered on into the early 90s (c.1992 from the looks of it) under the hood of the Hindustan Ambassador (née mkIII Morris Oxford)
That wiki piece on the Hindustan is a little “iffy” – it mentions early models having a side valve “B” series motor, but there never was such a thing.
Interestingly the wiki piece on the “B” series engine confirms that the A40 Devon used an ohv conversion of a pre-war engine, and the true “B” series came later- being larger and heavier than the Devon engine because they built more “stretch” into it.
ohv conversion – “they all did that”!
It is interesting to see the B-series started at 1200cc with 2.58″ bore & 3.5″ stroke, and at 1800cc it had 3.16″ bore still on the 3.5″ stroke.
The B was a fresh design for the A40 it was a downsized version of the 2.2 used in trucks and bigger Austins, there was no 1200cc sidevalve in their lineup to convert, Wiki is wrong again. It was also later used in the Morris Cowley and was bored out to 1622cc eventually for the Farina range,and 1800 for the MGB the block was redesigned in the mid 60s to a five main set up for the MGB and 1800, last used probably by Hindustan motors in their Oxford clone before they went to Isuzu power petrol and diesel.
Just checked my trusty Culshaw and Horrobin, an invaluable seventies reference work on British cars. It turns out the 1932-vintage 1125cc sidevalve four from the old Austin 10 (the car the A40 replaced in the market) had the same stroke. I’m guessing they did an OHV head to fit the old 10 engine, bored out the block 2mm and bingo, there’s your A40 engine.
We had a Somerset when I was young – most memorable feature was the hand cranked sun roof – great feature I have only had on one other car.
I had a hand cranked sunroof on my ’87 VW Jetta – it was the only thing on that car that worked flawlessly and never broke down or leaked!
I note the standard issue taillight assembly that seemed to decorate every British car in the 40s, 50s and 60s (my ’61 Minor had them).
So, a question for you folks across the pond, was this by gov’t edict or Lucas monopoly?
Lucas monopoly. The lighting regs had just been changed, so instead of one light over the licence plate, two lights on the rear wings were needed. As time went by more options became available.
And yet… I seem to recall the very first Austin A30s had only a single stop/tail light. I only ever saw one.
I guess the bigger A40, being intended for export from the start, was designed with two lights.
My eccentric uncle had a ’59 Austin Cambridge saloon, he bought it new after many disastrous episodes with their family’s ’54 Lincoln Capri. I was only 12 at the time, but I can recall us thinking what a miniaturized oddity after their big Lincoln. He was totally enamored of it, though. Turned out, it was a series of disasters, too, always breaking down and then parts were impossible to get. It was just as tall and stodgy as the featured Devon, but I remember it seating four adults very comfortably. My aunt later dumped it for a ’63 Chevy II. Hadn’t thought about this in years, but that Flying A hood ornament was perhaps its most unique and memorable element.
British cars were relatively common in the 1950’s in New Brunswick, Canada, mostly among recent (post war) British immigrants or (as second cars) with ‘old money’ families in our little town. I remember riding in a grey-with-tan-interior Devon once, and although to a Canadian kid in the 1950’s they were hopelessly old-fashioned (bordering on funereal) I remember being impressed by the quality of the interior. I was also fascinated by the amber ‘trafficator’ signals that sprung out of the side frame between the front and rear doors. Great visibility when tootling over to Great Crumley for tea in the English countryside, less so on a 50 mph run to a salmon stream at Nauwigewauk on a Canadian dirt road.
My parents also emigrated from England after the war, bouncing back and forth between Canada and the US a few times before settling in Canada. They liked British things of course, but were fairly clear-headed when it came to cars. When we were shopping for a new car in 1960 we test-drove, among the Falcons, Frontenacs, Valiants and Ramblers, a Wolseley 6/99 – with walnut dash, leather (ish?) seats, carpeting, etc. A beautiful car but seemingly small, fragile, and a little fussy, compared to the no-nonsense stamped-steel Falcon wagon we eventually settled on.
Was the Falcon the best choice? The wagon aspect was ideal for a young family with a Labrador, but the car was basically junk after about 4 years, a victim of my father’s enthusiasm for grouse hunting and dirt-road exploring (there were a LOT of dirt roads in New Brunswick in the late 1950’s). How would that oak-burled Wolseley have fared in the backwoods potholes, or on 2-day marathon drives to New York or Toronto, or with the Labrador and the grouse blood? Probably much, much worse…
The Wolseley wouldve lapped it up they survive dirt roads just fine and could cruise on motorways at 100 mph plus The early falcons were a POS compared
Yep, like Bryce said, those 6/99s (and the facelift 6/110) survived real well here in NZ on the roads of the time. Surprisingly solid cars. My late Uncle bought a 6/110 new, the brochure said it would do over 100mph…it wouldn’t, so the dealer replaced it with another new one for free – and the replacement easily did 100mph on the country back roads.
Quality control…..
Ca. 1960 a family my folks knew socially had a blue A40 Devon, which they called the Sputnik–I don’t know why. I’d never seen anything like the semaphore turn signals and thought they were retro cool, as was the car as a whole.
Today I’d worry that other drivers wouldn’t see the turn signals on such a car, simply because it wouldn’t be what they were expecting to see.
By the seventies most cars with ye olde trafficators that were still on the road here had been with fitted flashing turn signals. It was never law, but common sense.
From whom did the UK borrow in the late ’40s? The US? Or was there a precursor to the world bank?
The US.
See the YouTube links in my earlier comment
It helps to remember that the whole point of Lend-Lease was that Britain & its allies could no longer afford to pay cash for American war materiel, which was the arrangement of the earlier Neutrality Act.
America was a creditor nation until it decided that spending is better than saving.
The Rothschilds were why Britain was able to afford involvement in the Napoleonic Wars. Wellington was thus able to buy supplies from French peasants in specie (he wisely outlawed confiscation).
My father had one of these as his first car after he emigrated from the UK to Vancouver. It was replaced before I was born by this Morris Minor.
Growing up in ontario canada my dad, fredrick Alexander drove this same car all the time. He would tell me to go out to see the new car in the driveway and it would be the same model austn he had just sold and he was so happy to have found another one. I remember it grey in color. I believe he just missed his home in Liverpool England and this car was a bit of home.
I just love finding an old car I know nothing about out in the wild, then being able to come here to CC and read all about it. This ’51 was found in the little town of Jefferson Oregon, just filling up. I wasn’t able to talk with the owner much as he was filling it himself with non-Ethanol and for some reason it required all of his concentration and was very slow.
The diminutive size is just amazing. I have no idea how anyone larger than a small child could ever squeeze through the tiny rear doors.
As is obvious, this is a molested version, aside from the tires, it has only one row of seats and I think the gas cap is moved to the side above the fender rather than behind as in the pics above.
I wonder what’s really under the hood …
My father Owns this VERY car! (The exact car) lol wild it was on this website.
he was reading about it and saw the book in the back seat and checked other things and knew it was his.
previous owner lives in Eugene Oregon.
real nice guy.
Growing up as a car nut kid in 1950s England, these early A40s always struck me as a completely disharmonious design. They reeked of parsimoniousness and just looked awkward. The replacement Somerset was much better looking in a blowsy kind of way, then the weird tapered front A50 followed that.
And if you thought the model shown here was small, Austin had a surprise for you – the A30. Only small women and kids could even get in the thing! My best friend’s Mum had one and it was really tiny, the original Noddy car.
Austins and Morrises always seemed so uncool – cannot remember what word we kids used then, but you get the picture.
It is amazing to think the generosity shown to both our allies and the axis powers after the war. To take in their exports, despite a domestic industry that had adequate capacity, was generous to a fault.
At least the British in this period were sending over product that was so different to American offerings. Small sedans like this, a few Rolls Royces and the roadsters were tiny niches to exploit by nonconformists. This was an add to the market rather than the threat the car imports later became.
Generosity rarely has anything to do with these types of decisions.
It’s cute in a “fugly” kind of way. I’ll bet getting in and out of those very narrow back doors were a chore, even for kids let alone adults.
Just goes to show that winning a war isn’t always everything it’s cracked up to be. Rationing in Britain lasted until 1954 and desperate poverty was widespread well into the 1970s.
Then we joined the EU. Now we’ve voted to reintroduce desperate poverty – of expectation as well as cash. Makes you proud…
I don’t think exporting to US worked well for Austin. Canada bought more of them.
Growing up in a college/Army town with LOTS of obscure foreign cars, I never saw an Austin. Several Morrises and Anglias, but no Austins. Later on in the ’60s I saw several A40s in Toledo, probably leaked down from Ontario.
I remember seeing several Austin A40s from my childhood years in the US in the early 60s. And then there was the Austin America!
A great feature. These A40s were extremely popular in Australia, and outsold Holdens until the factories got up to speed. Two questions.
That painted panel underneath the front bumper – it only seems to show up on photos of North American registered A40s. Does anyone know what it was there for?
Early A40s (and other postwar British cars) often had tiny headlights, I’m guessing 5″. Does anyone know why this was done?
Austins Vauxhalls and Hillmans all had those smaller headlights until 1950, there must have been a law change somewhere, These Austin A40s sold well in NZ and many are still to be found in good condition unrestored they seem not to rust badly like other British cars of the era such as Vauxhalls and Fords.
True about Vauxhalls and Fords. Austin must have had access to better quality steel than the others for a while. Now that you mention it, the A40 Devons still running in the seventies never seemed to have much rust. Not like later fifties Austins; Somersets and Cambridges were terrible rot-boxes. I remember playing in several dumped ones as a kid.
The 1948 Austin A40 cars had the 5″ headlights and no parking light under it. In ’49 the design changed to 7″ lights and the parking lights below. I assume this was to meet North American tastes or requirements.
You want to know the coolest Austins that I’ve seen? One had a Olds Rocket engine stuffed into it, and (being a Thunderbird Super Coupe guy), you should have seen my jaw drop when I saw a guy at the local car show that had stuffed an SC motor into the engine bay. He said that he ran a 12.8 second 1/4 mile in it, and I believe him…..essentially, you’re doubling the power to weight ratio in a radically lighter car. He had even kept the intercooler, albeit with a MacGuyvered setup.
What a cutie ! .
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Too small to really enjoy although I do love me some LBC’s .
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-Nate
Came home from hospital after being born in one of those but have no recollection of it at all, my father having gotten himself a 53 Chev not long thereafter. They were reasonably popular in Israel back then.
Dumping of the A-40’s:
http://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-vancouver-sun/20120518/282664684425981
Thanks for the link. A little Canadian automotive history I knew nothing about.
sorry for the little pic
Did someone say Austin A40 ? :
http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/cto/5672544482.html
-Nate
It’s too bad about the paint scheme on that one…but if you want an A40, you may have to accept that you take what you get!
Here’s the picture for posterity.
Shriner’s parade cars are always very eye catching….
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-Nate
“…did all it could to make it look as big as an American car in the ads”
Pontiac wasn’t above some great exaggeration to sell its “Wide Track” models, by way of Van Kaufman and Art Fitzgerald. Just a mild case of advertising puffery.
Came across this oddity today – 22 new Austin A40’s dumped in Vancouver’s English Bay in 1952, apparently an example of a manufacturer ‘doing the right thing’. How times change.
https://www.hagerty.com/articles-videos/articles/2018/02/09/austin-overboard
I’ve walked along English Bay a few times and had no clue they were there. They probably made a great fish reef.
Ca. 1955 when I had a single-digit age someone in my family (not my parents) had one of these, which I’d ridden in a few times. At that time I was too young to be curious what model year it was.
One day it was announced that we’d be making a few-hour trip in the Austin. I whined, “It won’t be as much fun in the Austin.”
My mother responded with the 1955 equivalent of “Sucks to be you.”
I don’t remember what the alternative car would have been, nor why I disliked the Austin.
I was going through my collection of old Autocar magazines and found this review of the new A40 Devon in the February 13, 1948 issue. As the review makes clear, these cars were initially marked for export and were not readily available in the home market for sometime.
page 2
page 3
Since Bill Coombs’ link from 2016 doesn’t seem to work anymore, here’s a link to a Hagerty article on the dumping. It seems the boat had caught on fire and the cars heavily sprayed with salt water in the firefighting effort. It also turns out they were of the subsequent Somerset generation;
https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/austin-overboard/
To my eye the Devon seems better balanced between copycat and going out on its’ own than the prior generation Austins which looked like 2/3-scale 1937 Buicks and the following one, the Somerset apparently having been a deliberate effort to avoid American and Italian influences, the problem being that Detroit and the carrozzeria had developed the tricks needed to make the full-width pontoon body look good and by not using them the Somerset arrived both dated and weird-looking.
For those complaining about the styling of this Austin, in 1946 they would have sent you this.
Come and get it. Beginning of June on Craigslist. Needs head gasket, $8500.
“Britain actually received more than a third more Marshall Aid than West Germany – $2.7 billion as against $1.7 billion. She in fact pocketed the largest share of any European nation. The truth is that the post-war Labour Government, advised by its resident economic pundits, freely chose not to make industrial modernisation the central theme in her use of Marshall Aid.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/marshall_01.shtml
My wife’s grandfather bought an A40 in 1950 in Bredasdorp, South Africa and I am the proud owner of it today. I am still amazed at how willingly it starts and run especially in this high tech era where everything needs re-booting to function properly. It used to be a starter car for many families and young men in this country, but due to it not being a popular collectors item, there are few left running. Taking it out for a drive in Cape Town surrounds I get many waves from the older folks to whom I reply with a honk from the delightfully sounded horn