Dream cars

Six of the best

Herewith my final posting of the current series: a bit of light relief to wrap up.

I used to be interested in cars. I passed my driving test in 1962 at the age of 17, and eventually bought my first car, a 1958 Austin A35 with a slipping clutch, in 1965 for 195 pounds. I replaced the 948cc engine with a 1098 in 1969, top whack 75 mph with a following wind. A black one like this. 145ATG.

My final car, a Chinese MG, I bought in 2013 in China, kept it for three years then sold it. No point in Shenzhen in having a car, though many do, mainly for show I feel, particularly with BMWs and Mercs, but foreign cars are rapidly disappearing now from Chinese roads being replaced mainly by electrics. Electrics have green plates and petrol blue: I noticed today that almost all the blue were foreign, German and Japanese mainly, and all the green were Chinese. Sign of the times. Anyway as for owning a car here, distances can be very long, public transport is fast, frequent and plentiful, taxis are cheap, and you don’t have to find a place to park any of them.

So to me the desire to own a car is a 20th century thing, and looking at the mainly ghastly indistinguishable lumps that are turned out today, the most beautiful designs to me are all from the last century too. I show below what to me were at that time the six best examples from the mid-twentieth century. Here they are in ascending order.

With plain unpretentious clean lines - I liked the sweeping back - in 1951 when I was six years old the Jowett Javelin was my favourite saloon car. Not enough people thought so and Jowett went bust a few years later.

The Austin A90 Atlantic, my true dream car, also around 1951. Designed to appeal to the US export market it pretty much failed. Hey, this one is Welsh, it has a Merthyr Tydfil registration number!

Most cars at any period seemed to look much the same, but the 2 litre Triumph Vitesse of 1962, and the Herald it was based on, stood out from the ranks.

One Thursday morning in 1961, cycling to school, I stopped off at a newsagents as usual to pick up the weekly Autocar magazine. In the classroom, waiting to go to assembly, my mates and I goggled at the new Jaguar E type on the cover. There was nothing like it before or since.

The Citroen DS19, also from the 1950s, its design has never dated and still looks futuristic to me. I remember hitch hiking in 1969 and getting a long ride southwards in Spain in one, sweeping past everything, uphill and down. I remember the wife in the passenger seat saying “Ah, les voitures Espanols, comme ils sont bizarre”, but it was another French car she was remarking about.

Number one has to be the Delahaye, also French.

In the 1930s, as cars got faster and faster, design switched from boxy vertical shapes to horizontal lines with less air resistance. The word ”streamlined” was invented, it seems to have dropped out of the lexicon now. The Delahaye was the most extravagant example, and I only ever saw one, oddly in Aberystwyth in west Wales, in about 1961. I think I ogled it for fully five minutes. I can’t just choose one so here are a few for you to feast on. Some are grotesque but all are striking and unlike any other make.

Below, the 1937 135M:

Can’t identify but didn’t want to leave out. Just perfect.

The 1938 165 cabriolet.

This next the USA Pacific from 1939.

The 1949 type 175. Perhaps it was this one I saw.

Delahaye 165 Figoni et Falaschi (1939).

Delahaye 135 M Pourtout (1948). Beautiful swept back lines.

1937 Delahaye 135MS Roadster

1939 Delahaye Type 165 Cabriolet.

Of those four once British makes, only Jaguar still exists (but I read last week that its and associated Land-Rover’s sales have collapsed) and it is now owned by Tata Motors of India. The last remaining British car manufacturer was sold off abroad in 2019. I could give you a rant about this, but it has already been dealt with here:

waltking.substack.com/p/in-the-twilight-of-great-britain

What would be your picks?

Ok, just one more then, for curiosity’s sake and because I was a lifelong MG fan owning respectively a 1986 Maestro EFi, 0-60 mph in 8 seconds and happiest cruising at 90 mph; a 2004 TF two seater sports, 0-60 in 6 seconds; a 2005 ZR with a Janspeed conversion to 120 bhp (one of the last cars produced before the factory was shipped off to China), and finally my last car in China, that Nanjing MG saloon. It’s the 40th anniversary of the MG Montego turbo which in its day was the fastest four door saloon in the world.

That’s all for now. Forty-nine Substack posts and I’m all done. And out of Unz and out of MoA. If I can find inspiration again maybe I’ll be back some time, perhaps to discuss Welsh independence. But I have something else to do now. Thanks for reading me this past year, and all the best.

Walt

*********************************************************************************************************

POSTSCRIPT. I’ll have to take that initial statement back. Living part of the year in a part of the Philippines where public transport is slow, scarce to non-existent and exceedingly uncomfortable I have just been more or less forced to buy a car there. It’s a BYD Dolphin. Chinese, electric, of course. Nice to drive again after five years.

The Philippine house in that photo, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, aircon, with coconut trees in the garden, costs me GBP322 ($422) a month.

A white sand beach with waterside bars and a warm sea a short walk away, and year round summer. What are you still doing in the UK or the USA? I was reading yesterday that people, particularly young people, are leaving the UK in droves to find a better life: half a million left in 2024, and the same thing is happening in the US.

https://waltking.substack.com/p/getting-out