Relative to today, designing cars was very simple and inexpensive, and consequently the variety of car makers and coachbuilders and car types and prices seen at Olympia proved “almost embarrassing”.
We ran a stand-by-stand guide for readers heading to the venue, detailing all 157 brands. Yes, 157! Today, excluding specialists, there are only around 60 on our market.
(It’s interesting that only about 20 of those 157 still exist; and fun to consider how we could have ended up bemused by Bugatti, Chevrolet, Fiat and Renault, having grown up with Delaunay-Belleville, Moon, Schneider and Whippet.)
Many companies still sold cars as bare chassis, of course, and so there were another 149 firms at Olympia offering coachbuilding.
As well as metal, increasingly they were using the Weymann method of fabric on a wooden frame – cheaper, lighter and quieter yet almost as good-looking.
As well as the growing variety of body types (“how many are too many?”), a hot topic was the use of cellulose to improve paint and chromium to adorn metal – the future popularity of which we couldn’t be certain about.
Any last advice? “Buying the first nice car you see at Olympia is as silly as a man proposing to his first partner at his first dance.” Well, quite – and a few wise words about those “young apes”, some “dangerous”, who called themselves salesmen!