This one is close. I Googled 1950's Safety Car and this poped up, why i remembered it i don't know. Good thing about the HAMB is the fact that it allows you to clean out your memory from time to time. Bob
The one The37Kid posted is a commercial variant of a type which more often had a forward-facing bench seat in place of the cargo box.
"Automotive Weirdness" Hmmm, does that not describe 75% of the British automotive output?? Peel Trident?? Reliants, really, any of them. Bond Bugs. For the same reason as Reliants. RR Twenty. A car designed with a top speed of 20 mph!! Scott Sociable. Best not viewed with eyes open. Plymouth Cricket (whoops, that was weirdness, not horribleness) Moggie three-wheelers. Really, a motorcycle engine as your bumper?? Sterling. Great idea, take a Honda and make it unreliable. British Leyland. Another great idea, take an INDUSTRY, and make it unreliable. Let's not even Start on the post-war Germans.... Cosmo
One more, a car which I saw on the very day this photo was taken. The Eshelman company was based in Baltimore, and produced tiny cars for about a decade, '53 to '60. Yes, it IS internal combustion-powered.
Not sure where you got the idea of the RR "Twenty" having a 20mph top speed. "Twenty" was its RAC fiscal horsepower rating, at a time when a "sixteen" was a large family saloon. And this was the smaller Rolls-Royce. In fact, the "Twenty" was the basis of the Derby Bentleys, the 3½ and 4¼-litre which, despite being decried for their "impurity", were actually a very well-considered design. They weren't proper W.O. Bentleys, though. There was an earlier Rolls-Royce called the Legalimit, which was speed-governed as you describe. I'm not sure if the name was used on several different cars in different markets, but the Plymouth Cricket we had when we lived in Canada in the mid-'70s was a badge-engineered Mitsubishi Colt. It was wholly unremarkable, the antithesis of weirdness. My dad couldn't stop speculating as to whether a 318 would fit.
Weird, perhaps. But apparently a babe magnet! I thought that the early 70s Plymouth Cricket sold in the U.S. was a rebadged Simca, but apparently it was a Hillman-Rootes product. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillman_Avenger A few years later here in the States Dodge sold the Colt based on a Mitsubishi design.
According to Wikipedia the Cricket name was used on an imported Hillman Avenger in 1971-3 and, in Canada only, on a Mitsubishi Colt in 1973-5. Early Canadian Cricket: Late Canadian Cricket: I remember that the Hillman was sold in South Africa as a Dodge Avenger around the same time. But we digress: both these designs were thoroughly conventional in the '70s.
The Martin Stationette is just so cool! There was also a Martin Martinette, which presaged the BMW Isetta 300 significantly (though it does not seem to have been a particularly authoritarian car ...)
I refuse to badger the witness. He has already suffered enough. On topic (I hope), the early 1990s US Ford T-Drive concept strikes me as ill-conceived but interesting: http://www.drivingenthusiast.net/sec-ford/FMC-engines/t-drive/default.htm
Maybe he was thinking of the "Legalimit", one of the first V8 cars, made by Rolls Royce in 1905. It was meant to compete with electric cars for silence and smoothness and was governed to 20MPH which was then the speed limit in England.
I think the T-drive has a lot more potential than was explored. The weight distribution issue is easily solved by backsetting the engine relative to the front wheels, and if motorcycles can live venerably with primary drives, why not a car, given adjustment for load? After all, that's the case with the TH425 and its derivatives.
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