THE HISTORY OF THE J40
The J40’s tale is heartwarming. It was in 1946 that Austin boss, Leonard Lord, conceived the idea of producing a children’s pedal car. But his scheme went further still, with a plan for a dedicated factory mirroring the production processes of a real car plant, albeit in miniature. The prototype, dubbed JOY 1, was based on a scaled-down Austin Eight, but this proved too heavy and was reworked to be lighter and look more like the forthcoming A40 Devon. A sporty version, modelled on a pre-war Austin Seven racer, was also worked up and christened the Pathfinder.
Production started in summer 1949 at a purpose-built plant near Bargoed in South Wales. The workforce was drawn from disabled ex-miners, mainly suffering from the lung disease, pneumoconiosis. The Pathfinder didn’t last long, despite its sleek looks, and was dropped in 1950, but the J40 continued. Its price was £27, roughly equating to two to three weeks’ wages for the average worker. That everything was run in the same way as a full-size production plant meant that Austin sent its management trainees there to learn the art of being bosses, before they moved on elsewhere to help run the sprawling British Motor Corporation empire.
The J40 was very successful, with production often easily exceeding 1000 cars per year. As well as being sold to private buyers, they were given away as competition prizes, used in road safety schemes and for juvenile motorsport. Many also ended up being bolted to merry-gorounds at fairgrounds.
But the dawn of the British Leyland era in 1968 spelt the end for this Welsh Austin outpost. During BMC days, the operation had been viewed like a charity, but under BL, there was no such munificence. The J40 was losing money and thus the last one was built in September 1971, taking the total number manufactured to just over 32,000. In 22 years, the biggest design change was the removal of the rather sharp and pointy ‘Flying A’ mascot from the bonnet, for safety reasons. The factory survived, making parts for ‘adult cars’, before it closed in April 1999.