3 The challenges Allard faced were true of all automobile manufacturers in the early postwar years. Materials were hard to come by, and most potential customers could not afford a new car. Even used prewar cars were priced out of reach for most. The most ubiquitous form of motorized transport across Europe was the motorcycle. Motorcycles, however, offered little practicality and no protection from the elements. And a particularly rainy summer early in the decade of the 50s had people looking for a motorcycle alternative. Thus, the microcar was born. Microcars were miniscule automobiles that used as little raw materials as possible. They were basically motorcycles with a roof and one or two extra wheels. They were cheap to buy and, with tiny engines whose horsepower figures were often in the single or double-digits, cheap to run. Dozens of small companies sprang up all over the continent building tiny cars of varying quality. Cars like the Messerschmitt in Germany, Mochet in France, and the original Isetta in Italy put scores of Europeans back on wheels. In England, cars with three wheels were given a tax break both upon purchase and when registering. Manufacturers like Bond and Reliant took advantage of this to produce a range of three-wheelers for a fairly large market clamoring for inexpensive transportation. Even AC, manufacturer of the Ace which would become the basis for the legendary Shelby Cobra, produced a three-wheeler called the Petite. By the early 1950s, the established British car companies like Jaguar, MG, Triumph, and Aston Martin were back producing cars at full capacity. Even though they did not have many customers in the U.K., they had the ability to export cars in large numbers which generated the income necessary to modernize designs as well as manufacturing. Little Allard could not keep up building cars in the low hundreds. Allards were quickly becoming outdated, their performance was surpassed by sports cars from larger companies and their build quality paled in comparison to established brands. By 1954, the situation was grim when only thirtyfour Allards left the Clapham workshop. The company desperately needed to diversify to support automobile manufacturing. An answer came when a designer and engineer named David Gottlieb approached Allard with a design for a three-wheeled car that would be built from a novel material, fiberglass.
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