John Simister
John solves a mystery from way back in 1966
John solves a mystery that’s bothered him for 51 years.
Did you ever draw cars when you were a kid? Design your own, perhaps? I did, but they would never have got very far through any product-planning process. It would have helped had I been any good at art, but any art genes in my family got no further than my sisters.
Drawing a typical modern car nowadays has never been harder. They tend to be so exaggerated looking, so fussily over-styled with strakes and scoops and bits and pieces, that it’s very difficult to keep the image in your head once you’ve stopped looking at one, let alone producing an identifiable drawing of one from memory. They have become increasingly alike, too; I was staring at the side of some crossover thing in next-door-but-one’s driveway and I realised I had no idea what make and model it was. So the public has, by and large, turned off from the idea of creating a car design, just as the public is doing with the idea of interacting with cars or even owning them. Can you imagine a big-selling Sunday newspaper running a competition to design the car of the future? And the winners’ designs making the front cover of the magazine section?
Power to the people
Well, that’s exactly what the Sunday Telegraph did in 1966. In fact, there were two strands to the competition: a city car and an inter-city car. The winning designs were amazingly good, too.
Each entrant had not only to produce a colour rendering of the design but also an engineering drawing showing what the mechanical parts were and where they went. The winning and secondplace city cars were represented by brochure-class renderings, showing an egg-shaped, glassy device in first place, a more normal machine, resembling a Fiesta MKI, in second.
I can’t remember the city cars’ names, and much rummaging in my ‘archive’ has failed to uncover the magazine, but the inter-city cars are etched in my memory. Second place went to the Electra 2500, a study in dark blue that suggested an Oldsmobile Toronado with a lighter touch. And the winner? It was the Myatt Four Litre, in a lighter grey-blue showing a nose a bit like an MGB’S with its headlights set in swept-back nacelles but sleeker, with an air-slot instead of a grille.
The flanks were simple, daringly curvaceous in the way the curve in the sill was echoed in the droop, then rise, of the low waistline, but the curves were given tension by the dihedral ridge running from headlight to tail-light. Slim pillars and very deep glass gave an airiness never seen in today’s Euroncap-driven world, and the mechanical plan view showed a V8 engine, a rear-mounted transaxle and independent rear suspension. You could have imagined Rover making this car.
It was the work of one Reg Myatt. I had a vision of Reg in his late-thirties or early-forties, light brown hair, shirtsleeves, probably worked for a big chemicals company but had been good at art at school and was a bit of a car connoisseur.
All of which proves my imagination took over before I read to the end of the story. Now, thanks to the wonders of the internet, specifically a website called autopuzzles.com on which forum members have to guess the identity of a posted car and have to promise not to do a Google search, I have found the Myatt Four Litre again. Using Google, inevitably.
And I have discovered – it’s in the story, had I had the sense to read it all back in 1966 – that Reg Myatt was 12 years-old at the time. He was only a year older than me! Belatedly, I am filled with new respect for his effort, and not a little envy. Did he do it all himself? Where is he now, and what is he doing? Reg, are you out there? Tell us, please.
‘The Four Litre’s flanks were simple, but also daringly curvaceous’