Austin A30 + A35 - a four minute guide & history
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- Today I review the classic british 1950s Austin A30 and A35 in a four minute guide. Its predecessor being the Austin 7, the Austin 'New' Seven was relesed in October 1951, and became an instant icon. Many more good things would come, with the A35 being released a few years later, and a van-bodied variation.
(Please note - the photos are a random selection and don't necessarily link to the particular model being talked about at the time! thanks)
These cars are ommon sights at classic car shows for the rugged, cute dependability, and they are the perfect car for the classic car enthusiat. The A35 is also popular with racing drivers for its lightness, agility, economy and more.
If you enjoyed this video please drop a like and subscribe if you have not already done so. I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences concerning these cars in the comments below. Thanks for watching!
#austina30 #austina35 #austin7
I wish I could get my hands on 1 of those!😁
Wonderful! I love the tiny post-WWII British and Continental cars.
The very shiny black A30 934YUD in your video is a beaut! A black A30 was my first car in 1968, bought second-hand for, if memory serves me correctly, the princely sum of around £30. Despite much rot it served me well for a couple of years before being sold on (and still roadworthy) in favour of an Austin Mini.
My first car Austin A30 803cc engine top speed 63mph if you going down hill not 70mph as described maybe A35 could 70 as it had the bigger engine and different gearing unfortunately I've not owned one .but I still thought my A30 was great
My first car was a 1954 A 30 Reg. No VLM 184 I had it back in 1971 !!!!
Snap! My first car was also a 1954 A30 . I also had mine in 1971. Mine was green with 4 doors. The engine was smooth and great on fuel, though not big on power. However, it didn't matter much, as worn king pins made the steering wheel judder at any speed over 55MPH, so although it would easily do 65 MPH on the flat, I didn't often attempt it. Sometimes achieved an indicted 70 down hill. The brakes were very poor by modern standards, especially going backwards. I frightened myself one day, having to reverse down a steep hill and I really had to stand on the foot brake to get it to stop...which it eventually did. 50 MPG was easily achieved and it was fun to drive. I can remember the sensation of driving it, though more than 50 years have passed since I last drove an A30.
I had an A30 with the small back window, semaphore indicators and a 800cc engine. The car was heavy having a double skin body. The road holding was appalling with the back wheels sometimes jumping up after hitting a bump. Murder in wet or icy conditions. The driver had to double de clutch when changing down. I had the car in 1970. It was built in 1956.
How we have NOT PROGRESSED my 2018 Volvo V40 1.5 AUTOMATIC STRUGGLES TO MAKE 35MPG EVEN DRIVEN VERY GENTLY .ON MIXED ROADS TOWN COUNTRY N MOTORWAY !.TO GIVE AN IDEA IVE JUST REPLACED ORIGINAL DISC PADS AT MORE THAN 32000 .MILES MYGARAGE WAS AMASED HOW LON G PADS HAD LASTED .PS I BOUGHT AN A30 SOLD IT AS I WAS NOT MAKING FAST ENOUGH PROGRESS ON RESTORATION .
We now have 91 remaining in the world four door Austin A30 from the 54000 that were made from 1952 to 1956 we have 45 in the UK and 46 in the rest of the world so they are very rare.
You have no idea of the memories you have awakened herer!! Thank you!!
I had a childhood friend whose father had a green A35 estate variant (?) - anyway the one with the rear door. I remember travelling in the rear from Yelverton to Plymouth across the moors and getting excited at seeing the speedo almost touch 80 mph! No doubt the true speed was much less. Today, the speed limit on that same stretch of road is 40 mph......
😂 I remember dad used to have a Morris Minor MM, and the speedo on that was pretty wild too...
Great video, I Drive a 1954 Austin A30 and its still going well here in Sussex.
Great video thank you I have a 1954 Austin A30 I love it 😀 but I find people seem to pull out off side road's which Does make me cross.
These classic cars do go along well!!! :) Thanks for watching
The foreman at the garage I worked at in the 80's had a supercharged A35 in storage in the garage at his parent's house. He said it'd easily top 100 M.P.H. and he was going to restore it one day. I never found out if he did but I really hope so!
Thanks for the comment!!
Yes I have the same problem I think they think it's a old car and can't go that way Quick and then they get a bit of surprise.
love this car, little old guy called percy owned one when we were kids we all waved as he went past
I. Had a black a 35 loved it.
I had an green A35 , YRR67, drove it to the European Jazz Festival in the south of France.
Keith Lee.
Hi, thanks for the comment! I'm just uploading a video now so saw your comment really quickly 😂
I was told that I was conceived in the back of an A35 van . Told this tale to my girlfriend and then my cousin - turns out that's how they both also got into this world as well .
First car in 1964, 1954 A30, OMJ 866, written off, replaced in 1966 by 1956 A35 SVJ 460 for £60, with gold seal engine. Skimmed head, gas flowed, 1.5 CD Stromberg, Mintex M20 linings, went and stopped well.
As my father aged in the 1970s he found riding a bike to work the five miles from our home in Kilburn, South Australia to Thebarton was too hard especially when working winter night shifts. He purchased a pinkish A30 four-door for $150. On the way home one morning after a night shift while waiting to turn right from Chief Street onto Torrens Rd, a full size bus rear ended him.
The parcel shelf was touching the back of the front seat. The Austin was basically squashed to half its length. My father got out and with the help of other motorists pushed the car from the centre of Torrens Rd to the opposite footpath, told the local coppers what had happened and then walked home. Tough car. Tough man. He was 60 years old.
My dad had a Austin a 35, in a cream coulour beautiful little car reg tbx355 we went. Many miles in it . Even to Wales for a holiday never mist a beat back in the 60s
There seem to be very few photos of the A30 with the trafficator semiphore signals and the small rear window. I think it was an A30 that my grandfather drove in Burnaby BC because I remember it had the trafficators. He drove my brother and I from Burnaby to Hope and back on a grand adventure. I believe it was a rainy day in 1959 when I was 10. I don't know what became of that car.
I know a lot more than you,,,,,!!!passed my driving test ,first time in my fathers A35,, Y O M 5 9 7, what have you done,,,,? Nothing,,,,!
Nice, I was 13 when I made this. Glad you liked it!
This just popped up, nice one.
Liked the commentary and information always useful. I live in NI and have an A35 car. Cracking wee motors mine has 13k and was owned by a guy in London. Thanks again for your posting.
Cool, they look fantastic don't they? :)
I grew up in a family where an A30 or A35 was always on the list of cars we owned. The first one I remember from when I was about 5. It was a light green and was affectionally known as Merrily's Green Bomma, as it was to be my mother's daily at the time.....and some point, either Dad or one of his mates, fuelled by much beer and mischief, grabbed a black spray bomb and depicted this moniker down each side of the wee car! Merrily's Breen Bomma was one of the second version of the A30 (with the tank filler at the back) and had a 948 out of an A35 as well as the A35's diff. Dad had heavily modified the little engine - boring it out to 60 thou oversize, BCF631 ground camshaft, balanced crankshaft, ported head with larger valves and the point of the kidney-shaped combustion inset filed back to a nub and it ran with a twin-throttle-bodied 40mm side-draught Weber carburettor and had extractors and a 1.75" exhaust fitted. It was very quick, but first gear was near useless until Dad had also found some 14" alloy wheels and tyres that would fit the wee beast and lengthen it's stride. She would happily wind up to the end of the 70mph speedo and stay there - still accelerating happily all the way to 6500rpm. One thing Dad neglected to do was the brakes, so she still ran the thimble-sized manually adjusted drums front and rear, with an unassisted master cylinder feeding to the slaves up front and the single slave-to-mechanical setup down the back. Dad reckoned that the brakes were only good enough to slow the car to where the speedo was sitting on 50mph and then they overheated. He had plans to put a Morris 1000 rear brake setup in it, fit the front disc brakes from a Sprite (I think) and then fit an after-market brake booster, but in the end he sold it before that happened.
The next one was another 1955 model A30 that was a dark grey. The engine had seized, but Dad rebuilt it (standard this time) and she ran well. This one was called Gertie although nobody painted it's name on the side of this one. She had the 848cc engine (the second incarnation of the venerable A-series engine that had started out as the 803cc and was put in the first AS3 model A30s of 1951) and she again was Mum's runabout. Being a 2-door, the backs of the seats folded forward to let the rear passenger's in or out and there were no seat belts in the rear (as in my country - New Zealand - cars first registered after 01/01/1955 must have front seatbelts, but rear seatbelts were not mandatory until 01/01/1980). I remember being in the back of Gertie one day and a truck pulled out of a side street, so Mum hit the picks and I hit the passenger's front seat so fast that the back folded forward and I ended up halfway into the passenger's floor footwell when the car stopped! My sister sitting next to me hit the back of Mum's seat and set up such a howl because she had whacked her top lip and top teeth on the piping that goes round the edge of the vinyl. Her two middle top teeth turned brown over the next few days and remained that way until they were replaced by her adult teeth some 3 years later. Gertie was parked at the kerb outside Mum's work one day when the driver of a big articulated truck decided to look for a leak under his dashboard instead of the road......and he hit a nearly new 1977 Singer Vogue, which was accelerated to the truck's speed and pushed into a Morris 1000. The Morris 1000 hit the back of Gertie and bounced up onto the footpath right in front of a young mother pushing a pram with a baby in it....and Gertie was then collected and pushed into the rear of a Mark 2 Cortina and then into a power pole. All four cars were written off.
Peanut - a dark blue 1954 A30 - replaced Gertie. She had been fitted with a 948cc unit out of an A35, but other than that she was standard. We had that car for well over 12 years and I learned to drive in it. Peanut was treated to a lot of upgrades to make her safer and more comfortable rather than hotted-up - I think Mum had had a word to Dad after the Green Bomma and may have mentioned things like how she preferred to be able to stop when she needed to and see clearly at night.....and keeping warm and dry in winter despite what the weather was doing. Dad - I know from experience - would have had a hard time fulfilling that last one considering the propensity for the A30 - ANY A30 - to leak water inside from almost every seal. It was part of Peanut's character that she filled your right shoe up with water coming from a windscreen leak right above where your right leg was placed on the accelerator......
Peanut was still around in 1983 when Dad found a one-owner, 39,000 mile example of a 1957 Austin A35 and brought it home. This little car was like new inside and out. It was Old English White and a lovely car to drive. She had a very worn idler gear which made first and reverse gear sound terrible, but otherwise she was a gem. I drove that car to our family holiday spot in 1984 - some 10 days after getting my license - and over 120 miles of winding open road, of which the last 20 were unsealed gravel roads and very steep up and down. The car and I were both very relieved when we pulled up unharmed at the camping spot! Mum and Dad kept that wee car until 1990 and sold it so that Dad would have room in the garage for a newly-purchased XJS V12. I have still seen the car about and it is now two-tone green. Looks pretty sad in the fact they never painted the interior from its original white......and still have the bright red seats and door cards!
My first car was also - you guessed it - an Austin A30. Mine was a 1954 model 2-door with the original 803cc engine still in place. She was a one-owner car too and had done 70,084 miles when I bought her. My wee car also had a factory heater, factory ash-trays that were painted the same colour as the car - a dark grey, over-riders, chrome trafficators and a locking petrol cap. I sat my driver's license in this car too and I'll never forget the look on the traffic cop's face when the left trafficator failed to pop out of the B-pillar when I indicated left and I leaned over behind his shoulder and whacked the pillar hard so it came out! He may have thought I was trying to put my arm around him or something - I am not sure - but he gave me a very strange look.....and then checked the WoF (Warrant of Fitness.....which you call an MoT) to make sure it was valid! It was, of course. The outside of the car had been painted by the original owner for reasons unknown, as he had not fixed any of the rust that had been coming though or dents that he had put in the car. The paint actually did some good though as it stopped the rust in its tracks and protected the rest of the body from any form of scrape. I once side-swiped my Dad's wheelbarrow and I had a minor scratch in the gloop that had been thrown onto the car and spread about with a broom (or a wringer mop would be closer, considering the textured look the paintwork had), but after I rubbed the scratch, it disappeared, so no damage showed anyway. I had slid the front wing along that wheelbarrow at an angle and long enough to tip it over, so any normal car enamel or lacquer paint would have disappeared. I think the old fella must have used roof paint.....but anyway. The other feature my car had was that it used oil. It did not leak much, but boy did it chuck it up the cylinders to burn! If I sat at a set of traffic lights for more than 30 seconds, I would begin to see the odd waft of grey smoke drift up past the small back window of the A30 and when I put my foot down to move off in first, the cars behind me disappeared so completely that one day, one of them turned their headlights on! It was worse than a thick fog and it came out a one and a quarter inch exhaust pipe in such a column that I am certain if someone wanted to remake a certain James Bond movie, he could have driven my car and never had any bad guys find him - and he would not have had to flip a special switch! It used four litres of oil (nearly one imperial gallon) every 500 miles. Every time I filled it up with petrol, I would check and top up the oil and it would need a litre or more each time. One of my friends used to quip that I should pull into the full-service lane of the petrol station one day and ask them to fill it up with oil and check the petrol rather than the other way around! I had that little car for nearly a year when I sold it to a private collector with the odometer reading nearly 74,000 miles and bought a Mark 1 Cortina GT. I wish I still had the little A30 now though.
Hope you enjoyed this rather long post and it has given you some laughs, matey. I was fascinated with the A30 from a very young age and I love watching them - racing or just being driven in the country - on TH-cam and I never miss a Goodwood broadcast if I can avoid it! I have also written a story about one A30 we had sitting on our lawn that Dad did the equivalent of a "will it run" on, in order to check its gearbox out as a possible replacement for the tired one in Peanut, but its a bit big to put in here! My youngest daughter - now 17 - also has a love for classic cars and comes with me to every show we can find around our city. She's been doing this since she was 8 and saw her first classic Mini......so I blame her for the fact I now have three classic cars of my own - a 1979 Triumph 2500S M/OD (it is one of the last cars to come off the NZMC (aka BL New Zealand) assembly line here in NZ, some two years after they stopped producing them in the UK), a 1974 Triumph Stag M/OD and (of course) a 1977 Austin Mini 1000 with a 1275cc engine.
All the best - and keep posting them up. I'm now off to find the one on the XJ series Jags your Dad mentioned in his last vid. That's what I popped on your channel to see .....and then this caught my eye first!
Very interesting read, sounds like you're quite partial to an A30!
Great little video on the A30 and A35. Thank you!
Thanks for watching!