Inside Alvis: reviving a long-lost British car maker

Remarkably, the 3.0-litre post-war continuation models are powered by engines that Alvis manufactured in the 1960s and have been sitting in stock ever since. They’re minutely checked prior to fitment. New ones can be made if necessary. 

Alvis was founded by engineer and businessman Thomas G John in Coventry in 1919. Six years later, it became the first car maker to design and race a front-wheel-drive car. Three years after that, its front-drive cars claimed first and second places at Le Mans. In 1933, it designed the first all-synchromesh gearbox and later that year produced the first British car with independent front suspension. The war caused Alvis to shift its focus to the production of military vehicles and aero engines for the RAF, but after hostilities ended, car production resumed. 

Eventually, in 1967, Alvis stopped building cars. The following year, it relocated to Kenilworth, from where it concentrated on making parts for Alvis cars under the Red Triangle brand and restoring and servicing vehicles for customers. 

Over 50 years later, under the ownership of Stote, the company is still restoring cars and making and distributing parts around the globe for the 4800 Alvis models that remain on the road. Around 200 pass through its workshop each year. On the day I visit, Stote greets me in the company’s large showroom, filled with Alvis models of all ages. Stote’s enthusiasm for Alvis is infectious. He soon has me cooing over a 4.3-litre Bertelli Sports Coupé. I’m more familiar with the later, more restrained Park Ward-bodied TF21 cars, and there are a few in the showroom, but the pre-war 4.3s are stunning. However, all but the earliest Alvis models on display share a graceful, perfectly proportioned, low-slung look. Unfortunately, none is available to drive, so I’ll have to imagine how they feel. 

From the showroom, we walk the few hundred yards or so to the main workshop, a large three-storey building where the company’s 22-strong team of parts experts and craftsmen and women toil. It’s a fascinating place, with old Alvis heirlooms, including those original engines and even the original parts bins from 1929, rubbing shoulders with state-of-the-art production and vehicle testing machinery. 

Old and new skills rub shoulders, too. For example, in one area, Daz, an expert in aluminium work, is shaping the body panel of a continuation model using an English wheel. Every so often, he places it against a full-sized wood buck of the car to determine the accuracy of the curvature he’s forming. Watching him is Alistair Pugh of A2P2 Specialists Reverse Engineering, a specialist supplier, who uses a laser to digitise the original Alvis bodies to the last millimetre in order to generate the data necessary to produce the buck Daz is referencing.