First cars from 19 now-dead car makers

Where it all began

Depending on how sentimental you are about the motor industry, there can be something quite poignant about the demise of a car manufacturer.

All that time, effort and expense, and then, suddenly, nothing but memories and ageing secondhand metal.

Of course, every manufacturer had a beginning, a time of hopes and dreams. Here we remember those good times and present a selection of the first cars some of those departed companies produced, when a sense of impending doom was still years in the future.

And as we’re doing it in alphabetical order, let’s start with A…

1. Argyll

Bearing a strong resemblance to a contemporary Renault, the Argyll Voiturette made its debut in 1900.

It was built in Glasgow, but five years later the company moved into a startlingly elegant and expensive factory in Alexandria, near the southern extreme of Loch Lomond.

Argyll went through many liquidations before finally expiring in 1930. From 1976 until 1990 a separate Argyll company, specifically named after the first one, built a tiny number of mid-engined supercars in Lochgilphead, a town which, unlike Glasgow or Alexandria, is actually in the district of Argyll.

2. Austin

Having fallen out with his previous employers at Wolseley, Herbert Austin created his own company whose first products were the 25/30 of 1906 and its smaller-engined, cheaper and much rarer equivalent, the 15/20.

These were grand cars, in contrast to the tiny but tremendously successful Seven produced from 1923 to 1939.

Austin merged with its rival Morris during the creation of the British Motor Corporation (BMC) in 1952, and the name was abandoned in 1987.

3. Austin-Healey

Austin-Healey was formed as a joint venture between BMC and the Healey company. Its first product, launched in 1953, was the 100, which initially used a four-cylinder engine from the Austin A90 before a switch to a six-cylinder from the Westminster.

The final version, with an enlarged version of the Westminster engine, was the 3000, which was very successful in motorsport.

These cars are known as the Big Healeys to distinguish them from the Austin-Healey Sprite. This was produced in three generations from 1958 to 1971, when the relationship between the two companies came to an end.

4. Bizzarrini

After stints at Ferrari and Iso, Giotto Bizzarrini set up his own company to build racing cars in 1964.

A street version called the 5300 GT Strada and fitted with a Chevrolet small-block engine appeared two years later, to be followed by the much less powerful 1900 GT Europa and the mid-engined P538.

What all this might have led to in future years can only be imagined, since the Bizzarrini company folded in 1969.

5. Chrysler Europe

Hoping for success outside North America, Chrysler bought the Rootes (UK), Simca (France) and Barreiros (Spain) companies in the 1960s, and merged them to form a short-lived organisation called Chrysler Europe.

The Chrysler name was given to cars previously known as Simcas, Hillmans and so on, but the first model sold from the start as a Chrysler was the 180, also known as the 160 or 2-Litre depending on what engine was used.

Production lasted until the early 1980s, by which time Chrysler Europe had been sold for a nominal sum to PSA Peugeot Citroën.

6. Clan

Along with the Ginetta G15 and various models built by Davrian, the Clan Crusader was one of the best of the British Hillman Imp-based kit cars.

It was produced from 1971 until 1973, when the imposition of VAT on kit cars more or less killed former Lotus engineer Paul Hassauer’s business.

A similar, though redesigned, car without the Crusader name was built by a new Clan company in Newtonards, Northern Ireland, from 1982. The same outfit also created a version with Alfa Romeo running gear (appropriately called Clover), but very few were built before the firm went into receivership in 1987.
 

7. Delahaye

Émile Delahaye’s Type 1 model dates back to 1895, three years before his company was created. Primitive though it looks now, the Type 1 was a very good vehicle for its time, and was rapidly followed by several successful race cars.

Delahaye subsequently became a specialist in luxury cars. This became a problem during the years of austerity after the Second World War, and the name faded from the motoring scene in the mid ’50s.
 

8. DKW

Judicious purchase of a patent for two-stroke engines led to DKW becoming the world’s dominant motorcycle manufacturer in the 1920s.

In 1928 it launched its first car, the Type P, which was offered in standard and, as pictured above, shorter sports forms.

The last DKW was the F102 built from 1963 to 1966. It was followed by the F103 which, though similar in many ways, had a four-stroke engine.

Volkswagen, which owned the brand by that time, wanted people to forget about noisy, smelly two-strokes, and called the new car an Audi instead. It is only because of this that all current Audis are not known as DKWs.

9. Facel Vega

Facel was already well established as a builder of bodies for other people’s cars when it became a manufacturer in its own right in 1954.

The first Facel Vega was a very stylish car with a Chrysler Hemi V8 engine and, it is widely considered, suspect handling.

The last aspect was not enough to kill the company. That was achieved by the later Facellia, whose engine was calamitously unreliable

A switch to Volvo engines came too late, and the Facel Vega story came to an end in 1964.

10. Holden

Unlike Facel Vega in almost every other respect, Holden is at least similar to the French company in that it started out building car bodies.

It became a manufacturer only after its purchase in 1931 by General Motors, which was keen to develop its presence in Australia.

The first Holden-branded car was the 48-215, produced between 1948 and 1953. A pick-up version called the 50-2016 was launched in 1951.

Things went quite well for several decades after that, but in 2017 Holden stopped building cars and became simply an importer. In 2020 GM announced that the brand would be discontinued entirely.
 

11. Innocenti

The creator of Lambretta scooters found a way into the car industry by manufacturing local versions of BMC products.

The first of these, in 1960, was the A40, which had been launched in the UK as an Austin two years earlier.

Innocenti later built its own variants of the Mini, Austin 1100 and Austin-Healey Sprite, and was for a while owned by BMC.

The business eventually faded away, and the Innocenti brand was dropped by its then owner Fiat in 1996.
 

12. Marcos

The first Marcos was a sports car officially called the Xylon, though often referred to (quite understandably) as the Ugly Duckling.

Not particularly attractive, it was nevertheless very quick, and raced to great effect by future three-time Formula One World Champion Jackie Stewart in the early 1960s.

Like Argyll, Marcos had a torrid history with several collapses and resurrections, the most recent of the former having taken place in 2007.

13. Matra

Originally an aeronautics company, Matra moved into the motor industry by purchasing Automobiles René Bonnet.

The first car it put its own badge on was the Bonnet-designed Djet, perhaps best known now for being an extremely early example of a mid-engined roadgoing car, pre-dating even the Lamborghini Miura.

Later Matra projects included the 1977 Rancho (which would now be referred to as a crossover SUV) and its final model, the 1980 Murena sports car.

Matra later developed the first-generation Renault Espace and the extravagantly peculiar Renault Avantime.

14. Morris

The ‘bullnose’ Morris Oxford first appeared, to considerable acclaim, in 1913, and remained in production until 1926.

It was followed by a series of very successful models (including the post-war Minor and Mini), but the brand gradually faded as it merged with Austin to become BMC, which became British Leyland, and so on.

The last Morris-badged vehicle was a commercial version of the Austin Metro. Today’s (BMW) Minis are assembled on what used to be a Morris site in Cowley, Oxfordshire, in the UK.

15. Prince

The Prince badge first appeared in 1952 on the AISH Sedan, which was rapidly developed through six generations in five years. Several other models followed until Prince was taken over by Nissan in 1966.

No Prince cars have been built since then, but a faint echo of the old company remains: the current Nissan Skyline’s model name was first used by Prince in 1957.

16. Saab

Aeroplane company Saab made a dramatic entry into the car market with the innovative and exceptionally aerodynamic 92 of 1949, whose basic design could still be seen in the 96 which went out of production in 1980.

General Motors hailed it as one of its top 10 cars in 2008, even though GM had no involvement with Saab until 40 years after the 92 was launched.

Saab remained an innovator (being, for example, an early adopter of turbocharging for performance cars), but it was also financially troubled. It did not survive for long after its sale by GM in 2010.

17. Simca

Strictly speaking, Simca began building cars in the mid 1930s, but to start with these were rebadged products designed by founding company Fiat and manufactured in France.

The first ‘real’ Simca, if you want to call it that, was the Aronde of 1951. This and some later Simca models were very successful, but the company’s absorption into Chrysler Europe did not go well, and it ended up buried somewhere within PSA Peugeot Citroën.

18. Sunbeam

Not counting a successful quadricycle called the Mabley, the first Sunbeam we would now recognise as a car was the 12 horsepower model first displayed in public in November 1902. It was soon joined by a more powerful, six-cylinder, 16 horsepower version.

Notable for its passenger cars, trucks, aero engines and race and record machines, Sunbeam did well until the 1930s, when it had to be saved by Rootes, which in turn became part of the sorry Chrysler Europe story.

Sunbeam was last used as a brand name in 1977 and as a model name (for the Chrysler/Talbot Sunbeam) in 1981.

19. Tatra

Czech company Tatra is known for aerodynamic cars with very heavy engines behind the rear wheels and consequently alarming handling. However, its first model, the Präsident, was quite unlike this, and indeed fairly conventional for an 1897 design.

The last Tatra car (almost unknown in western Europe) was the 700, which was discontinued 102 years after the Präsident was launched. Tatra still exists, however, and nowadays concentrates on building trucks.

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