The Car Spy

Some people of a certain age remember steam engines. Living proof of an industrial revolution that helped change the world whilst making the most modest of train journeys a noisy, dirty but somehow enthralling, emotive experience. The job of a train driver was high on the wish-list of most adolescent young men smitten by the glamour of those powerful steam engines.

And then came the electric train. Clean, fast, efficient but with all due respect to train operators today, young boys stopped wanting to drive them.

The death of the steam-age and the arrival of electrification occurred a number of decades ago and yet the internal combustion engine, in some ways as primitive as the steam engine, has survived. Perhaps it is that childhood passion to control something mechanically powerful that even as adults we (as petrol-heads anyway) have an addiction that is hard to overcome.

And so times, however and inevitably, are changing (or rather evolving) again. Autonomous, electric cars are the future we are told and like it or not, just like the fans of those prodigious steam locomotives the baton will be reluctantly passed on to a new generation.

But, for the time-being at least, that looks like a dream for the future which means that today we can still experience the sheer joy of driving a car that was designed for pleasure and not just for purpose.

Despite being powered by relatively old technology, the new cars of today are frustrated by modern technology which means that they do a specific job for which they were built in the safest, most efficient manner that the (constantly evolving) law demands. Driver aids are de rigueur.

However, a car built in the analogue age will offer just about the purest mechanical connection to the dynamics of driving a car with four wheels and British sports cars of the 1950’s and 60’s provided the perfect ingredients for an evocative drive.

Enter the ‘Big Healey’ that we have on sale here. (more…)