The Car That Was Too Clever
The history of the British motor industry is a treasure trove of cars that were brilliantly engineered, ahead of their time, and often complete commercial disasters. But few are as tantalising as a forgotten prototype from 1952, a car that perfectly demonstrates what happens when a genius designer is briefly let off his leash at a very traditional, very conservative car company. This is the story of the Alvis TA350, the masterpiece that Alec Issigonis designed, and that Alvis was unable to build.
The story begins with a falling out. The brilliant and famously difficult engineer, Alec Issigonis, had a row with his bosses at the newly formed BMC and took his colossal brain to the small and respectable Alvis company in Coventry. Alvis was a firm that built magnificent, old-world sporting saloons using slow, traditional coachbuilding methods. They had a loyal following, but their business model was a dinosaur. Facing a future dominated by mass-producers like Jaguar, Alvis management knew they had to modernise or die. They hired Issigonis with a bold brief: design a new, modern car that could be the basis for a complete transformation of the company, with an ambitious target of 5,000 cars a year.
A Car from a Different Planet
What Issigonis came up with was a revolution. He threw out Alvis's traditional body-on-frame construction and designed a modern, lightweight monocoque chassis, suitable for mass production. Into this, he inserted a magnificent, all-aluminium 3.5-litre V8 engine of his own design, a compact, powerful, and incredibly advanced powerplant for the early 1950s.
The cleverness didn't stop there. The car had a rear-mounted transaxle for perfect weight distribution and inboard rear brakes. And for the suspension, Issigonis collaborated with his friend, Dr. Alex Moulton, to create a system of interconnected rubber cones. This was the very earliest version of the "Hydrolastic" suspension that would later make the Mini and the Austin 1100 ride so well. On paper, this was one of the most advanced saloon cars in the world.
Issigonis had one more trick up his sleeve. He designed the car with front-wheel drive in mind, with the chassis engineered so that it could be accommodated if desired. The flat floor and compact suspension layout would have made such a conversion possible. Issigonis was already thinking about the future of car design
The Inevitable, Tragic "But"
It was a work of pure, unadulterated genius. And, of course, it was completely and utterly doomed. Issigonis had done his job perfectly; he had designed a car that could be mass-produced. The problem was that Alvis was not a mass producer. To build this car would have required them to abandon their old workshops and invest a fortune they simply did not have in new factories, new production lines, and new tooling.
The final nail in the coffin was a classic case of British industrial bad luck. Ford and BMC, bought up all the independent body suppliers. The estimated cost for Alvis to have the bodies for their new car made suddenly doubled. The project was now not just ambitious; it was financial suicide. A single, magnificent running prototype was built, and then the project was quietly and unceremoniously cancelled.
A Legacy in Other People's Cars
With his grand vision in ruins, a disillusioned Issigonis was eventually lured back to BMC by its boss, Leonard Lord. And it is here that the spirit of the Alvis V8 had its revenge. The lessons Issigonis learned at Alvis about advanced suspension, front-wheel-drive packaging, and space efficiency were not forgotten. He poured all of that brilliant, frustrated thinking into his next projects: the Austin 1100 and, most famously, the Mini.
The Alvis prototype was a dress rehearsal for the two cars that would go on to define the British motor industry for the next decade. The brilliant ideas were all there, but they were in a car that was too ambitious for the small company that had commissioned it.
The sole prototype was scrapped. It has become a Holy Grail for motoring historians, a lost masterpiece that exists only in grainy photographs and faded blueprints. It was a tantalising glimpse of what might have been, a reminder of a moment when a small British company dared to dream of a brilliant, high-tech future, before the harsh reality of the balance sheet brought them crashing back down to Earth.