When the Glass Company Made Better Cars than the Car Companies
In the 1970s, a decade famous in Britain for power cuts, industrial strife, and a spectacular lack of automotive ambition, you’d assume the most exciting concept cars would come from a plucky sports car maker. Or perhaps one of the big manufacturers in a rare moment of clarity. You would, of course, be completely wrong. The most forward-thinking, visually arresting prototypes came from a company that made windows. Yes, Triplex, the safety glass people, decided to show the entire British motor industry how its job should be done.
A Wedge of Italian-British Madness
The first shot across the bows came in 1976 with the Triplex "Ten Twenty Special". The name was as drab as a wet Tuesday in Coventry, but the car was anything but. The project started with the humble underpinnings of an Alfa Romeo Alfasud, a fine-handling but rust-prone family car. Designer Chris Humberstone then threw the sensible Italian body in the bin and replaced it with a fibreglass wedge so sharp you could shave with it. It had a colossal glass canopy and, somehow, a staggered six-seat layout inside. While the big manufacturers were still bolting on chrome bumpers like afterthoughts, the Ten Twenty had flush-fitting polycarbonate ones. It looked like it had driven straight off the set of a sci-fi film and into a world of beige Morris Marinas.
Giving a Princess a Makeover
If the first car was ambitious, the second, from 1978, was a full-blown miracle. This time, the donor car was the Austin Princess. Turning an Austin Princess into an object of desire is like trying to teach a badger to do ballet. It was a hydrogasmic wedge of misery, famous for its odd proportions and catastrophic build quality. Yet the design house Ogle took this lump of automotive despair and created the "10-20 Glassback". They transformed it into a dramatic fastback with a gigantic, one-piece glass hatchback that was pure futuristic theatre. It was a stunning piece of design that proved the old adage: there are no bad cars, only designers who haven't been given a big enough budget to fix them.
The Magic in the Windows
These cars weren't just styling exercises; they were rolling showcases for glass technology that was bordering on witchcraft for the era. The Glassback’s windscreen had a heating element made of a fine-wire mesh that could demist the whole screen in seconds. No more scraping with a credit card on a frosty morning. It also had a radio aerial embedded within the glass itself. So why, you might ask, were we still snapping off coat-hanger aerials in car parks a decade later? The simple answer is that the people at Triplex were thinking about the future, while most car company bosses were thinking about their lunch.
A Very Public Nudge
Triplex had no intention of selling these cars. Their purpose was far cheekier. They were a massive, very public, and very expensive piece of industrial nagging. Every time one of these prototypes appeared at a motor show, it was a direct challenge to the bigwigs at British Leyland and Ford. Triplex was effectively standing on a stage, pointing at its creations and shouting, "This is what your cars could look like if you just tried a bit harder! This is the sort of flush glazing and integrated design you should be doing!" It was a component supplier showing its customers how to do their own jobs properly.
The Legacy of the Glass Cars
While the Ten Twenty and Glassback faded into automotive history, their ideas certainly did not. The move towards flush-fitting glass, integrated bumpers, vast glass hatchbacks, and aerials hidden in the windows became the defining design language of the 1980s and beyond. These concepts proved that genuine innovation in the beleaguered British motor industry often came not from the top down, but from the specialist suppliers in the network. Triplex didn't just build a couple of wild concept cars; they built a working crystal ball, and it’s a shame so few manufacturers bothered to look into it sooner.