Viewed from the end of the century, the AV Monocar might look like a joke, but in its day it was a popular and effective little ‘cycle car’. This short-lived type of machine was really a cheap half-way house between the motor cycles and more ‘grown-up’ light cars of the day – and most first owners seem to have graduated to them from motor cycles when they were looking for a little more comfort, and stability. The AV was one of the first of this type, though the later, and more sporting GN became more famous.
AV of Teddington in Middlesex, was founded by Ward and Avey Ltd., who bought a cycle-car design from another struggling designer, John Carden (between 1919 and 1925 there was also a different Carden car), and began producing monocars at Carden’s own factory. The first cars were delivered in 1919, and by 1922 prices had fallen to a mere £115. To make such machines profitable at those levels, they had to be more ‘cycle’ than substantial ‘car’, and were very cheaply (some say nastily) built.
As its name suggests, the original Monocar was a single-seater, with a wheelbase of only 6 ft 6 in, and it was only 2 ft 6 in wide. It was not, in fairness, a very efficiently packaged car because, within three years, the famous Austin Seven appeared, used a shorter wheelbase, and could carry four people in tolerable comfort.
Although AV’s workforce totalled 80 men, this light machine had spidery, minimal, bodywork by Thames Valley Pattern Works, made out of a combination of plywood, papier mâché and mahogany with some aluminium skin panels. |
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Most of the cars seem to have been painted red, with black mudguards (or sometimes merely of polished aluminium). Steering was by wires which passed around strategically located bobbins (which could be very perilous, especially when the unlubricated bobbins began to wear, or fray). From the V-twin air-cooled JAP or Blackburne motorcycle engine, transmission was by chain, through a Sturmey Archer three-speed motorcycle gearbox.
Not even the very low price or weight (the first cars weighed only 600 lb, or twice that of a large motorcycle), could make the Monocar universally popular. Although this was a crude little machine, it was at least simple, and therefore easy to repair when things went wrong (as they often did). Later attempts to broaden its appeal by making it longer, with two tandem seats, or even as a wider Runabout with two parallel seats were not a success.
All cars of this type were eventually defeated by competition from the cheap Austin-Seven, and even from the bulkier Morris ‘Bullnose’ Cowley, and the last of several hundred AVs were built in 1924. AV reverted to selling other makes of car (notably Jowetts) and survived into the 1950s.
In the Monocar, the driving position was low, the occupant’s legs being angled sharply forwards into the pointed nose, and to make this possible the engine was mounted in the tail, driving the rear wheels.
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