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If ever there was a car I would have dearly loved to have seen in the flesh and driven, in a carefully controlled mood of understated joy, it was a car of such classic lines that even today its timeless clean-cut form does not look out of place.
As a marque, Alvis was a car that moved the Autocar magazine of August 1938, to comment;
“In the scheme of things, there are cars, good cars, and supercars, the Alvis falling definitively into the latter category.”
No doubt, the journo who wrote that was talking of the 4.3 litre Vanden Plas Tourer with its 0-50 in 7.6 seconds and top speed of 110 mph. That is still a decent turn of speed even now in 2024. Or perhaps it was the Bertelli Sports Coupe of 1935 with very similar performance figures. Then again, maybe it was the four-seater open-top Lancefield, with coachwork specifically designed for the London Motor Show. Again, this was no slouch on the blacktop.
Earlier this year, visiting a local Motor Show in Tokyo, I was amazed and delighted to discover not only was Alvis still making those cars as part of what is called a Continuation Series, but also the two cars that set me all of adither when I first saw them. The Park Ward Drop Head Coupe, and the Graber Coupe Cabriolet.
The minimalist lines of these two cars, making them gorgeous without even trying, are the epitome of cool. If Mr Cool himself, Steve McQueen, had been a car, he would have been an Alvis.
As I stood mesmerised at the entrance doorway to the main hall, where the Continuation Series was on show, my mind all too easily wandered, seeing myself sitting in the Drop-Head, my cashmere sweatered arm dangling over the door as I sauntered across Europe in grand style, cruising across the Swiss Furkapass, which has a curve which is marked as "James Bond Strasse" after the scene was featured in ‘Gold Finger’. One can but dream.
As Continuation Series cars go, such as Jaguar and Aston Martin, the Alvis comes in at a bargain price a shade under three hundred thousand pounds. That, my friends, is what you might call a bit of a steal. And although I haven’t got anywhere near that amount of disposable income, it is feasible that one day I might be able to scrape the necessaries that would allow me to not just feast my smitten eyes on an Alvis, but actually to manage to take one out for a drive. Where’s a lottery win when you desperately need one?
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