Motoring
Alan Judd
I am locked in a debate with myself.
The issue is a 1946 Austin 8, a dumpy little 900cc four-door saloon whose 24bhp engine might have – when new – propelled it to a heady 61mph. It has faded black and red bodywork with rust spots and a sunroof but looks as if it’s structurally OK.
The red leather interior is clean and the instrument panel, as with almost all cars of that period, is remarkably uncluttered compared with their modern descendants – just dials and switches, with one missing.
There are a couple of modernising concessions to contemporary driving – an alternator instead of a dynamo and indicators rather than trafficators that no one would notice any more.
It’s for sale in an online auction with no reserve. Current bidding is £525. My guess is it should go for £3,000-£4,000. Anything under £2,000 is a bargain.
What is it that tempts me? Not so much its cuteness – though it is undeniably cute – as the fact that it’s as old as me. I was born in 1946 and have long desired a similarly aged steed in my stable, confident that if it’s survived this long, it will outlive me.
It’s not easy to find reasonably priced relics of that year. The British motor industry was just about staggering to its feet after the war and most of its products were stop-gap continuations of pre-war models, destined to be overtaken by post-war designs within a couple of years and so of little subsequent value.
The Austin 8 was one such, launched in 1939 and – unlike most models of the era – produced until 1943 as a runabout for officials and the military. It was dropped in 1947.
Nerdishly, I looked up its dimensions to see whether I could knock up something from a few sheets of corrugated iron to stable it at the side of the (full) garage. It is just four feet eight inches wide, a reminder of how our cars – like their owners – have put on weight over the years.
Even a Mark V1 Bentley – launched that same year – was only five feet nine wide, while its contemporary Mulsanne equivalent is just under six feet four. Today’s VW Up, one of the smallest cars on the road, is five feet four and a half.
In a recent survey of the 23 most popular contemporary cars, the website Cargurus found them up to 55 per cent bigger than their 1970s ancestors, let alone the Neolithics of the 1940s.
At over seven feet three wide, the Range Rover takes up 86 per cent of a conventional parking space, squeezing in by about seven inches. Parking bays are usually just over seven feet ten wide, their dimensions unchanged in half a century.
I suspect the same is roughly true of most individual garages. A friend with a modern house found she could get her almost-six-foot-wide Volvo XC70 in with reasonable ease. But once it was in, she couldn’t get out because the door would open only a few inches.
What’s to be done? Make smaller cars? Unlikely, given the demands of crashsafety legislation, the fact that it costs nearly as much to make a small one as a big one (but you can’t charge nearly as much) and that the electric vehicles we’re supposedly switching to all have to carry very heavy batteries.
Make bigger garages? Easy enough – except that it would mean fewer houses on site and builders probably wouldn’t do it unless compelled. Larger parking bays would be a start, requiring action from the Department of Transport and the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation. Tell that to the marines.
Turns out I don’t have to build another garage. The little Austin went to another buyer for £3,000.