Month: September 2011

The car industry’s quest for tech is moving forwards at an incredible rate. Built in TVs, iPod players, key-less entry and tons of other great inventions are common in luxury […]

Anything but an average company? I rarely have much reason to be grateful to my 14 year old self, but searching through some old papers at the weekend, I was […]

MINI, official partner of Team GB and ParalympicsGB, has unveiled its new London 2012 special, limited edition models to celebrate the monumental London 2012 Olympic Games. There will be just […]

Keith Adams Here’s an interesting one. Well, when we say interesting, perhaps it’s more a case of scary. Whatever your opinions on the ‘Twini’ prototypes, it’s good to know that […]

Keith Adams In 1985, Citroën facelifted its long-running CX fastback. There was little wrong with the basic shape of the car, but with the onset of newer aerodynamically styled rivals […]

Alex Sebbinger It was about two years ago that my good friend Rhydian Edwards and I decided to partake in a Banger Rally. Having read about the adventures of Keith […]

Early sketches by Steve Harper show that Rover was thinking big for its range topper… Heading for the big-time August 1983, and the Coupe takes shape. Steve Harper pegs the […]

Some radical ideas were tried before settling for the pleasingly ambient interior of the Rover 800 Saloon interior sketches Coupe interior sketches January 1984, and thoughts have turned to the […]

The 800 Fastback was an integral part of the XX design process, as these sketches by Steve Harper and clay models from the Canley Styling Studios clearly show. Development of […]

The Rover 800 underwent a very interesting development programme, with much work being undertaken at Canley before the Austin Rover engineers and stylists ever got near Honda in Tokyo. Some […]

Details of the Radford-converted 1100s are still quite sketchy, but on this page we have tried to pull together what is currently known. ALONGSIDE its much better-known Mini de Ville […]

Having served their apprenticeship with Britain’s finest coachbuilding company, Messrs Wood and Pickett were well-placed to cater to the demanding customers who ordered cars from them decades later… A potted […]

The Birmingham firm of Thomas Startin Ltd is probably best-remembered as a long-standing Austin (and later Rover) dealership, but the company also had a mainly-commercial coachbuilding arm. Originally established in […]

The long and the short of how the 75 was stretched… MacNeillie Regency In 1999, the 800-based Regency gave way to a new version based on the Rover 75, again […]

Startins borrowed a suitably gracious-sounding name from the Daimler marque for their stretched 800… THE Startins Regency was the first Rover-based limousine conversion to be aimed primarily (though not exclusively) […]

Rapport International was founded by Ian Leaf, a graduate of Ealing Business School. Ian ran a very successful trading business and eventually purchased the goodwill of Chris Humberstone design, employed […]

Radford came late to the coachbuilding industry, and despite undertaking a wide variety of work, the name – like that of rival Wood & Pickett – would become indelibly linked […]

Two cats for the price of, well, two… THE above picture gives little clue as to why, at £35,000 in 1983, this rather special Jaguar should have cost well over […]

The J72 was a modern re-make of the SS100 based on Jaguar componentry, done in Bob Jankel’s own inimitable style…

With their workshops in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, and a showroom in the Lexham Mews, Kensington, Lynx Engineering catered for the requirements of Jaguar-lovers who wanted something a bit special. Founded […]

The origins of Avon date back to 1919, when a Mr Tilt and a Captain Phillips founded the company in Warwick in order to specialise in the production of coachbuilt […]