Also in my garage
A piece of mobility history provides a change of pace for this Volkswagen enthusiast
Neal Anderson spent 12 years hunting down a Thundersley Invacar, the three-wheeled ‘invalid carriage’ so redolent of Britain’s 1970s roadscape. By rights, his search should have been forever fruitless: in 2003, the government decided they’d had their time, and ordered that the last few hundred still in use be rounded up and exterminated.
“The chap selling it was friends with the Hull agent,” says Anderson. “The agent had kept two, giving one to his friend, a farmer, for his son to mess around the fields in. He wasn’t really allowed to do that, but I’m glad he did because there are perhaps only 30 survivors, with only a handful of them roadworthy.”
Classic cars have been part of Anderson’s life since he was 16, when he pulled a ’72 VW Beetle out of a Northern Ireland quarry. He still has it, alongside a ’56 oval-window Beetle, an ’83 VW camper and a ’95 Volvo 850 T-5R. Yet acquiring the Thundersley drew on his deep-seated respect for the little vehicle and the freedom it gave. In the diamond-jubilee year of the National Health Service, it has a renewed significance.
“I’ve always been interested in social history,” he says. “You saw these everywhere when I was a kid, even in the corner at football matches. They were basic – dangerous, even – but they played a valuable role in giving people mobility. By the 1980s they’d gone from ubiquitous to unacceptable and derided. Most were unceremoniously scrapped. I wanted to try to preserve one.”
The NHS provided motorised carriages to disabled people, including those injured in WW2, just as it did wheelchairs; they’re not so much cars as mobility aids. With the final ‘Model 70’ in 1970, this version was standardised nationally in its signature pale blue. The Model 70 was designed by AC, with production shared between AC and Thundersley Invacar.
The simple chassis has a two-cylinder, 493cc Steyr-puch boxer engine (from the Haflinger) in the back, with variable belt-drive transmission that’s as fast backwards as forwards. However, the special aspect of the glassfibre-bodied trike was the 56 ways its controls could be specified, such as the option of a steering wheel, handlebar (as here) or tiller, to suit the driver’s abilities.
“It’s simple but well thought-out,” says Anderson, who works for a communications agency. “I didn’t want to take away its patina, so I’ve just cleaned it and got it roadworthy. Also, thanks to the Invalid Carriage Register, I got its original registration back.” Many of the parts are from other cars, so it took detective work to find replacements such as the Mini indicator stalk, Triumph switches and Land-rover indicators.
Anderson first drove it in June last year, to the Bromley Pageant, where it went down a storm: “I was pressing the floor with my feet, looking for pedals that aren’t there. At first it feels counter-intuitive to all other cars, but it’s quite easy and even fun to drive – a bit wallowy, but surprisingly nippy. There are reports of people doing 80mph, but I’ve done 50 and that’s quite enough. Thank goodness the engine is detuned!”
The one major downside is that the Invacar is a solitary experience: “It’s a single-seater. Even on the dash it says ‘passenger carrying is forbidden’. It might have given mobility, but it was anti-social. That said, I suspect loads of kids rode shotgun to the shops in them with relatives…”