Ariel: The Company That Couldn't Make Up Its Mind

If you mention the name "Ariel" to someone today, they'll probably think of the Atom, that mad-looking piece of automotive scaffolding with a Honda engine that's famous for rearranging Jeremy Clarkson's face on television. But the modern Ariel, is a different company entirely. It's a spiritual successor. 

The original Ariel was one of Britain's oldest and most inventive vehicle manufacturers, a company that started when cars were still a dangerous novelty. And a company with a brilliant, maddening, and ultimately fatal identity crisis. For the first thirty years of its life, it couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Was it a bicycle company? A motorcycle manufacturer? Or was it a builder of grand, expensive motor cars? It tried, with varying degrees of success, to be all three at once. This lack of focus is precisely why the name isn't spoken in the same revered tones as Rolls-Royce or Bentley today. But for a brief, glorious period, Ariel built cars of such quality and ambition that they could stand with the very best. It's a story of what happens when engineering genius isn't matched by a sensible business plan.

The company's roots go back to the very beginning, building the first Penny Farthing bicycles in 1870. This pioneering spirit meant that when the internal combustion engine arrived, Ariel was one of the first to strap one to its frames, creating motorcycles in 1898. Just four years later, in 1902, they built their first car. And it wasn't some timid little runabout. The first Ariel was a complex, four-cylinder, 10-horsepower machine, a clear statement that they intended to compete at the quality end of the market.

An Excess of Ambition

Throughout the early 1900s, Ariel's cars grew in size, power, and complexity. They produced a bewildering array of models, from small two-cylinder cars to enormous, six-cylinder behemoths designed to carry lords and ladies on grand tours. The engineering was always advanced, the quality was always superb, and the price was always terrifyingly high. This was the central problem. Ariel was building cars with the quality of a major luxury brand, but without the name recognition or production scale to make it work.

While firms like Ford and Austin were finding immense success by making one simple, cheap car for the masses, Ariel was resolutely swimming against the tide. They were building magnificent, over-engineered machines in tiny numbers for a market that was rapidly shrinking. It was a business model based on pride and engineering prowess, which is almost always a recipe for financial disaster.

The Car That Broke the Company

The end of this first automotive chapter came after the First World War. Ariel launched a new, beautifully made 15hp car that was, by all accounts, an excellent machine. But it was far too expensive for the austere post-war market. Sales were pitiful. The company, which was also trying to fund its successful motorcycle division, was bleeding money. By 1932, it was bankrupt.

The company was bought out by a man named Jack Sangster. Sangster was a hard-nosed businessman, and he took a long, cold look at the balance sheets. The motorcycles, particularly the new Red Hunter model designed by the brilliant Val Page, were profitable. The cars were a black hole of debt. He made the only sensible decision available: he sold off the car-making division and shut down car production entirely to focus on the bikes. The first, ambitious, 30-year-long chapter of the Ariel car story was over.

A Two-Wheeled Intermission

For the next quarter of a century, the Ariel name became synonymous with motorcycles, not cars. And they were magnificent. Under the design genius of Edward Turner, the company produced the Ariel Square Four, a bike with a unique and famously complex one-litre engine. It was the two-wheeled equivalent of a grand tourer, a machine for gentlemen who wanted to cross continents at speed. Along with their tough-as-nails Red Hunter singles, these bikes made Ariel one of the most respected motorcycle brands in the world.

This two-wheeled success was, in a way, a constant, rumbling reminder of what the car division might have become if it had ever found a steady footing. The same engineering excellence that went into the Square Four had been present in their early cars, but the bikes had a clear market and a sensible price point. The cars had been exercises in ambition over common sense.

The Final, Three-Wheeled Insult

The Ariel motorcycle company continued to build its famous bikes through the 1940s and 50s. But the British motorcycle industry was in for a reckoning. Ariel was taken over by its rival, BSA, in 1951. For a while, it was allowed to continue, and even had a final burst of success with the two-stroke Ariel Arrow. But the glory days were over. In the mid-1960s, the BSA group, itself in deep financial trouble, began axing its historic brands. The last vehicle to bear the famous Ariel name, in 1970, was a truly dreadful, tilting three-wheeled moped called the Ariel 3. It was a pathetic and insulting end for a name that had once stood for pioneering engineering and grand motor cars.

A Ghost Reborn in Scaffolding

The story of the original Ariel car company is one of frustrating, tantalizing potential. They had the engineering talent to rival anyone, but they lacked the commercial discipline to turn that talent into a sustainable business. They tried to compete with Rolls-Royce on a Morris budget, and the result was inevitable.

And yet, the name refused to die. Decades later, a new, tiny sports car company decided to resurrect the name for its new creation, a car made of exposed scaffolding and raw horsepower. They chose "Ariel" because, for all its failures, it still represented a spirit of fearless British engineering and a willingness to do things differently. The original Ariel may have failed to sell its magnificent cars, but it succeeded in creating a legend that was too good to stay dead.

The modern Ariel company, which builds the Atom, has no direct lineage to the original firm. They are simply enthusiasts who understood that the name Ariel was too good to be left to die. It's a name that represents a certain kind of British spirit: inventive, sometimes brilliant, often a bit too clever for its own good, and ultimately, a glorious, frustrating, and much-missed piece of our industrial history.