Lanchester Motor Company

Lanchester Motor Company was a car manufacturer based at Armourer Mills, Montgomery Street Birmingham, Great Britain. It ran from 1895-1955.

The company was started by Frederick Lanchester, one of the most influential automobile engineers of the 19th and 20th century.

The first Lanchester in 1895 was designed as a car not a horseless carriage and led to the first production cars in 1900. These had two cylinder horizontal air cooled engines with two crankshafts rotating in opposite directions to give smooth running. Steering was by side lever not wheel. The gearbox used Epicyclic gearing. The 1904 models had four cylinder water cooled overhead valve which were now mounted between the front seats rather than centrally. Design started to become more conventional with wheel steering from 1912 and pedals and gear lever replacing the original two lever system of gear changing. George, Frederick's brother, was now in charge and the engine moved further forward to a conventional position in the sporting side valve 5.5 litre six cylinder Forty.

After the first World war the Forty was re-introduced with a 6.2 litre overhead cam engine in unit with a 3 speed gearbox still using epicyclic gears and a worm drive rear axle. The Twenty One of 1924 had a 3.1 litre engine mated to a four speed conventional gearbox and this grew to the 3.3 litre Twenty Three in 1926. The Forty was finally replaced by the Thirty with straight eight 4.4 litre engine in 1928.

Daimler
The company was taken over in 1931 by BSA who also owned an upmarket brand in the British Daimler company and production moved to their Coventry factory. The great years for Lanchester were now over and the models were generally overlooked by the company in favour of Daimler models. The first new offering, still designed by George Lanchester, was the Eighteen with hydraulic brakes and a Daimler fluid flywheel. The Ten of 1933 was an upmarket version of the BSA 10. The pre war Fourteen of 1937, known also as the Roadrider, was similar to the Daimler DB17 with its 1.6 litre six which anachronistically had a fixed cylinder head until 1938.

Post war, a ten horsepower car was reintroduced with the 1287 cc LD10 which didn't have a Daimler equivalent and the four cylinder 1950 Fourteen / Leda was upstaged in 1953 by a six cylinder Daimler version called the Conquest.

The last model, of which only prototypes were produced, was called the Sprite and in 1956 the Lanchester name was phased out. The parent company, Daimler, was in decline and in 1960 was absorbed by Jaguar, who used the Daimler name in the same way Daimler had used the Lanchester name. Both became victims of badge engineering in their last years of production.

Monument
An open-air sculpture, the Lanchester Car Monument, in the Bloomsbury, Heartlands, area of Birmingham, designed by Tim Tolkien, is on the site where the first four wheel petrol car was made by Lanchester.