Cotswold Little Motors

‘Building the car you dreamed of when you were young for the children of today’

Many of us dream of driving around in a bespoke open top vintage car, some are fortunate enough to realise those dreams as they grow older, but what if we could we could open up these opportunities to the younger generation and pass on this passion?

With this vision, Cotswold Little Motors designs & engineers bespoke aluminium bodied junior cars, each one aiming to capture what makes the vintage & historic cars that we dreamed of, special. Each car starts life as a simple sketch, capturing the client’s own taste & design influences. These then move into 3D on the computer, allowing the detailed design & engineering to be developed & visualised, before finally being brought to life in the workshop. It’s here where the flat panels of aluminium are beaten & hand-formed into the curved bodywork, before being married to the mechanical hardware, resulting in the envisaged machine.

Variants range from pull along models, suitable for the first few years, through traditional pedal powered & steered as they grow and into electrically powered, and if you’d like, remote controlled machines in a range of styles from liveried racers to elegant tourers. Either way they’re designed to complement a modern lifestyle, fitting in the back of the family car where a buggy

or pram would, and more importantly, have storage space for a picnic lunch out! As these are hopefully something to be treasured for years to come, the design is an exercise in packaging, ensuring the very young, to the not so young, can fit, all while being durable enough to take the toll of many muddy walks.

The business was born out of the feedback received while out with the original prototype car, made for the founder’s son. That idea, conceived while his wife was still pregnant, was to make something more interesting than a buggy or pram, that would stay with his son as he grew. Many months of evenings & weekends spent cutting, machining, shaping, refining & trimming resulted in the car you see here. The first proper test run was a sunny afternoon through the Maple trees at Batsford Arboretum, resulting in a very happy toddler and smiles from all who saw it. Since then the core design had been developed, upgraded & re-tested and is now a familiar sight at the local walking spots.

The engineering that goes into these designs draws on the founder’s automotive engineering background in the vehicle dynamics & chassis areas of premium vehicle OEMs. This means the skills & knowledge gained there in analysis & test driving is applied here, just shrunk down a few sizes! One of the new models includes fully independent suspension, which draws on the same principles applied during the development of its full size counterparts; it does also have a little teak rimmed aluminium steering wheel, that definitely doesn’t however! Another stark contrast to modern cars, is that the vehicles here draw on a purer, more analogue era of timelessly styled machines, more suited to tearing up a hillclimb, and so don’t age, just gather patina that tells their story.

More information on this little company & their designs at www.CotswoldLittleMotors.com