Is the Austin 7 the most important car ever made? | Axon’s Automotive Anorak

Very first introduced in 1922, the diminutive Austin 7 speedily turned Britain’s initially correct ‘peoples car’, likely on to come to be something of an institution, this technically conventional nevertheless completely groundbreaking small automobile efficiently wiping out the briefly well-liked cycle cars of the period (just is its religious Austin 7 successor – the Mini – did in 1959, resulting in the grateful demise of the present-day and primarily grim and inadequate microcars).

The straightforward aspect-valve straight-4 747cc Austin 7 soon out-bought the earlier Morris (Bullnose) Oxford as Britain’s most prosperous car, with just about 300,000 illustrations designed in Longbridge alone in between 1922 and ’39 in extra than 35 differing ‘factory’ body kinds, all pre-courting Britain’s beloved Morris Minimal and BMC/BL Mini by decades.

The 7 also served as the basis of a couple of today’s motoring giants – BMW and Nissan – by way of the 1st Dixi and Datsun designs, constructed domestically under licence (at the very least in the circumstance of the former!), along with other world-wide Seven derivatives generated beneath arrangement by Bantam in the Usa (the originators of the Earth War II Jeep) and Rosengart in France.

In addition, other now established and revered automobile makers previous and present, these types of as Jaguar (by way of Swallow Sidecars/SS) and Jensen, owe their incredibly existence to the little Austin by offering fetching coachbuilt ‘alternative’ sporting and luxurious derivatives of the product in the 1920s and ’30s.