VAUXHALL TALES

To add a bit more information on Vauxhall Velox EIP cars to what Allan Dick gave us in his last Burning a Grey Pipe column.

In the early fifties, in Auckland in particular, the side-valve Morris Oxford was a very popular taxi. However when the EIP Velox appeared in 1952 in Whangarei, and I guess other towns, the Vauxhall became the most popular taxi through to 1958 when the PA appeared. It was New Zealand’s number one selling car through that period.

A couple of anecdotes from that period – the car’s wipers were mechanically driven via a cable from the engine, reaching frenetic speeds as the revs increased. A fellow apprentice where I worked had his hands up under the dash and reached out and switched the motor on and the wiper linkage swung across and jammed his fingers in the linkage. Ouch!

The first of the EIPs had a feature I liked. There was a catch along each side of the bonnet and you could open one side and have it propped wide, or let go both sides and lift the bonnet right off. Regrettably, Vauxhall dropped that feature after a year. I believe Buicks of a similar age also had that same feature.

Also on the first of the EIPs there was a button on the front corner of the back seat that you pushed to open the boot. My Uncle had one of these early models and he came north to proudly show us his new car. On the way he was waved down by a passing motorist and told that his boot lid was flapping and spilling his luggage all over the road.

Brian Skudder, via email

I had a letter recently from friend Don Ammon who has built and raced a variety of cars over the years but latterly two single-seaters of his own classic design – the first with a Daimler SP250 engine and now a second with a Triumph 2000 motor.

He brought up the hoary old story that I touched on last issue, surrounding the introduction of monocoque, or chassis-less, cars. That’s something that is generally credited to the EIP Vauxhall and Zephyr MkI, but it actually goes back a long way before that.

It was common talk in the early fifties – and the focus always seemed to be on the Vauxhall – that these new cars ‘without a chassis’ were so weak that if you turned a corner too fast, the doors flew open. Or, if you towed a caravan the body stretched and you couldn’t open the doors.

I guess fathers talked about it over a beer with their mates and brought the talk home, where it was picked up by us car-mad kids and chatted about in the school lunch break. We all had vivid imaginations and we all knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone that had had that particular trouble. It was all nonsense, of course. Incidentally, the first British car to do away with a conventional chassis and go for unibody or monocoque construction was the 1937 Vauxhall 10-4, so by the EIP Vauxhall designers and engineers (or were they American?) would have known what they were doing. You would think.

In his letter, Don tells of the first Vauxhall PC Cresta to be delivered to his home town of Te Awamutu. Don personally witnessed both rear doors burst open simultaneously on the PC when it was just a few days old. The driver engaged low gear ‘roughly’ and gave it a big bootful of acceleration on an undulating road and ‘pop’ went both rear doors.

It was returned to the dealership on Monday morning, where GM supplied a kit of two brackets that were to be welded from the front inner mudguards to the bulkhead to reduce body flex!

Obviously one occasion when the engineering sums hadn’t been calculated quite right! Allan Dick