Are coachbuilt cars making a return?

Road Test

byMarkSlack

FROM the earliest days of motoring, cars were built on a rolling chassis to which a body could be added by a coachbuilder. Some of the best known proponents of this art were, and are starting to be again, Rolls­Royce.

Names such as Mulliners, Hooper, Park Ward and Thrupp and Maberly produced bodies that adorned the likes of Rolls ­ Royce, Bentley, Alvis and Daim ler. In the 1960s Vanden Plas featured on models such as the Vanden Plas Princess R pow ered by a Rolls gine. More ignominiously it also appeared on much later BL models such as the Allegro! Another coachbuilder was Swallow, based in Blackpool, which started life as Swallow Sidecars and ultimately became Jaguar.

Coachbuilt cars were still not uncommon in the early 1960s, but as monocoque construction took hold it reduced production