Motor panels

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Smith's Panels Ltd.
Motor Panels Ltd.
legal form Limited Company
founding 1920
resolution 1995
Reason for dissolution insolvency
Seat Coventry , UK
management Arthur S. Smith
Number of employees 1000 (1939)
Branch Automotive industry (body shop, automotive engineering)

The Motor Panels Ltd. was a British coachbuilder based in Coventry . The company developed and manufactured bodies for cars , especially sports cars, as well as cabs for trucks .

Company history

The company was founded in 1920 by Doncaster- born Arthur S. Smith (1884-1943). Smith was a skilled metal worker. His company initially traded as Smith's Panels Ltd., before changing the name to Motor Panels Ltd. around 1925. was changed. In April 1939 Arthur Smith withdrew from the company. After that there were a few changes of ownership. In 1991 the last owner applied for bankruptcy protection for Motor Panels, and in 1995 the company was wound up due to insolvency.

Car bodies

In the late 1920s, Motor Panels was the preferred bodywork supplier for the Swift Motor Company . When Swift ceased operations in 1931, Motor Panels ran into economic difficulties. In 1939, Motor Panels was taken over by William Lyons after voluntary bankruptcy . The intention to establish Motor Panels as Jaguar's own body manufacturer could not be implemented because of the outbreak of World War II. In 1943 Lyons sold the company to the industrial group Rubery Owen . In the post-war period, Motor Panels built body shells or body panels for Alvis , Armstrong Siddeley , Austin Motor Company and Daimler . One of the last projects outside the commercial vehicle sector was the record-breaking Blue Bird CN 7 , which Motor Panels helped build in 1960. There are reports that Rolls-Royce considered having the bodyshells for the SZ series ( Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit , Bentley Mulsanne and their further developments) built by Motor Panels in the late 1970s . But nothing came of it; the order ultimately went to Motor Panels' long-standing competitor Pressed Steel .

Supplier to the truck industry

The management of the Owen Group did not consider the market for car bodies to be profitable in the long term and shifted the activities of Motor Panels to the commercial vehicle sector in the 1950s. The company then concentrated on building cabs for trucks and in the 1980s became the largest independent company in Europe in this sector. In the early post-war period, the British truck manufacturers built the cabs largely by hand according to the traditional patterns of body construction. Only Leyland, the largest truck manufacturer in the country, had sufficient capacity for the construction of machine-pressed cabins. For the small manufacturers such as ERF , Guy , Seddon Atkinson and Scammell , who could not afford this, Motor Panels developed a standardized driver's cab made of pressed sheet metal in the 1950s, which was manufactured in large numbers and customized for the individual brands with little design deviations could be. The truck cabs were also used by the Dutch truck manufacturer Floor (FTF) and by Mack . The construction has been gradually developed over the years. An innovation was the driver's cab called Mark IV from 1966, which is 2.5 m wide and contains a bunk arranged across the direction of travel.

In the military sector, Motor Panels built the bodies for the Stalwart amphibious vehicle on behalf of Alvis in the early 1960s .

Gallery: Vehicles with superstructures of motor panels

  • Blue Bird CN 7

  • Constructed by Motor Panels: Daimler DR450

  • Motor Panels' standardized Mark III cab on a Guy Big J (1972)

  • Mark III cab on a Foden S40 (1970)

  • Mark IV cabin on a Scammel Crusader

  • Mark IV cabin on a Floor military vehicle (1970)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Damien Kimberley: Motor Panels (Coventry) Ltd. www.historiccoventry.co.uk, March 2017, accessed April 15, 2020 .
  2. ^ A b History of Motor Panels on historywebsite.co.uk (accessed April 16, 2020).
  3. ↑ David Thoms, Tom Donnelly: The Coventry Motor Industry: Birth to Renaissance , Routledge, 2017, ISBN 9781351730402 .
  4. ^ Graham Robson : Jaguar , Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012, ISBN 9780747812678 , p. 15.
  5. ↑ James Taylor: Jaguar XJ-S: The Complete Story , The Crowood Press, 2019, ISBN 9781785005848 .
  6. ↑ Motor Panels on the website www.gracesguide.co.uk (accessed April 15, 2020).
  7. ↑ Donald Stevens: Bluebird CN7: The Inside Story of Donald Campbell's Last Land Speed ​​Record Car , Veloce Publishing Ltd, 2010, ISBN 9781845842802 , p. 107 ff.
  8. ↑ Malcolm Bobbitt: Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit & Silver Spur Bentley: Mulsanne, Eight, Continental, Turbo R, Brooklands & Azure , Veloce Publishing Ltd, 2005, ISBN 9781904788751 , p. 29.
  9. ^ NN: Motor Panels: Cab manufacturer and trend seller , Commercial Motor, March 16, 1985.
  10. ↑ History of Mack Trucks in Europe with images of a contemporary sales brochure showing different variants of the Mark IV (accessed April 16, 2020).
  11. ^ Matthew Vale: Alvis: The Complete Story , The Crowood Press, 2019, ISBN 9781785005886 .