Lanchester Motor Company

The Lanchester Motor Company Limited was a British car manufacturer in active trade between 1899 and 1955. Though the Lanchester Motor Company Limited is still registered as an active company and accounts are filed each year, the marque has been dormant since. As of 2014 it is marked as "non-trading".

The Lanchester company was located until early 1931 at Armourer Mills, Montgomery Street, Sparkbrook, Birmingham, and afterwards at Sandy Lane, Coventry England. It was purchased by the BSA Group at the end of 1930, after which its cars were made by Daimler on Daimler's Coventry sites. So, with Daimler, Lanchester became part of Jaguar Cars in 1960.

In 1990 Ford Motor Company bought Jaguar Cars and it remained in their ownership, and from 2000 accompanied by Land Rover, until they sold both Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors in 2008, who created Jaguar Land Rover as a subsidiary holding company for them. In 2013, Jaguar Cars was merged with Land Rover to form Jaguar Land Rover Limited, and the rights to the Lanchester car brand were transferred to the newly formed British multinational car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover.

This business was begun by the three Lanchester brothers, Frederick, one of the most influential automobile engineers of the 19th and 20th centuries, George and Frank who together incorporated The Lanchester Engine Company Limited in December 1899 retaining the financial support they had previously received from the two brothers, Charles Vernon Pugh and John Pugh of Rudge-Whitworth. Others who took directorships included the Whitfield brothers, J. S. Taylor and Hamilton Barnsley – a master builder who sold the business to BSA-Daimler in 1931.

Work on the first Lanchester car had been started in 1895, significantly designed from first principles as a car, not a horseless carriage, and it ran on the public roads in February or March 1896. It had a single-cylinder 1306 cc engine with the piston having two connecting rods to separate crankshafts and flywheels rotating in opposite directions giving very smooth running. A two-cylinder engine was fitted to the same chassis in 1897 and a second complete car was built alongside it. This led on to the first production cars in 1900, when six were made as demonstrators. These had two-cylinder, 4033 cc, horizontal air-cooled engines, retaining the twin crankshaft design. Steering was by side lever (or tiller) not wheel. The gearbox used epicyclic gearing. The first cars were sold to the public in 1901. In 1902 Lanchester became the first company to market disc brakes to the public. They were mechanical and on the front wheels only. The discs were very thin and made of a very soft metal like brass. Although probably leaving much to be desired, they completely fit the definition of a disc brake, and beat all others to market by many years.

The Lanchester Motor-Car Company show a number of handsome vehicles. The design here is novel throughout, or, rather, it differs from other designs, as the Lanchester car was one of the first English cars to be made. The engine is horizontal and is balanced in a most ingenious manner, the change speed gear is by epicyclic trains controlled by band brakes, the electric sparking is most ingeniously contrived, and the suspension is also of special type. To describe the mechanism of these cars would, however, be impossible without elaborate diagrams. They are notable for their easy running and absence of vibration.

All bodies were made by external coachbuilders until 1903 when a body department was set up, until 1914 most cars had Lanchester built bodies. In 1904, despite a full order book, the business ran out of money and The Lanchester Engine Company Limited was put into voluntary liquidation. After a period of management by a receiver the business was re-organised re-capitalized and incorporated as The Lanchester Motor Company Limited later that year.

The 1904 models had a 2470 cc, four-cylinder, water-cooled, overhead-valve engines featuring pressure lubrication, very unusual at the time, and were now mounted with the epicyclic gearbox between the front seats rather than centrally, resulting in a design with the driver sitting well forwards and without a bonnet. Six-cylinder models joined the line-up in 1906. The specification started to become more conventional with wheel steering as an option from 1908, becoming standard from the end of 1911, pedals and a gear lever replaced the original two-lever system of gear changing. George Lanchester was now in charge, Frederick having resigned in 1913. The engine was moved further forward to a conventional position in the sporting Forty, with a side-valve, 5.5-litre six-cylinder engine, but very few were made before the outbreak of the First World War. A distinctive feature of the engine's valves was their use of leaf springs, rather than coil springs. Frank Lanchester ran the London sales office.