Classic cars forum & vehicle restoration.

[Ellis]

In the 1960s when I was taking an interest in cars the range of vehicles to be seen on the roads everyday was vast ranging from 1920s Austin Sevens and above. There was one very elderly lady living here who was still using an Austin "Big" Seven every day until the mid 1960s.

British cars apart, foreign cars were rare. One saw the occasional VW Beetle and Simca but anything else stood out.
One elderly gentleman, a Mr Doughton who had spent many years in India retired here and his daily transport was one of these :

A Heinkel Trojan, his was a green coloured one.

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There were one or two others as well. One family which was
noticeably "eccentric" ran two of these for some years.
Wartburg Knights :

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Horrible,smelly things they were too. The same family bought one of the first Lada Rivas, in red, in 1976.
I was surprised to learn that over 20,000 of these Wartburgs were sold in the UK over the years.

There were also a few of these around. They were described as "mini" Chevrolet Corvairs in appearance at least.
The NSU Prinz :

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Contemporary road tests criticised them for their noisy rear air cooled engines but I remember them as quiet, quieter certainly than a VW air cooled unit.
Speaking with a village resident some weeks ago, he tried to remind of one of these in the area, a Goggomobil, but I have only a hazy memory of something that looked like it :

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Can you think of any other small European cars that were sold in the UK in the 1950,/60s or 70s?
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Starting Handle Expert

1964 Jaguar Mark 2 3.4 litre
1962 Land Rover Series 2a 88"
2002 BMW M3 E46 Cabriolet

[mikeC]

Living in Chesterfield, I saw plenty of VWs as Gordon Lamb was a very active dealer; around 1960 he took on the SAAB dealership too, so from the early 1960s two-stroke SAABs were also seen regularly.

I suspect there must have been a major Renault dealer nearby - probably in Sheffield - as the 4cv Renault was another regular sighting in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

If you are going to stretch things to the 1970s, then Fiat 850s, and then 127s and 128s, became another foreign regular sighting.

[Rick]