Austin 16 hp

The Austin Sixteen of 1945 to 1949 was a 2.2-litre car and the first new car Austin made after the Second World War. Apart from the name it shared nothing with the pre-war Austin Sixteen. It used a new four-cylinder 2,199 cc overhead-valve engine, the first in an Austin, in the chassis and body of the pre-war Austin Twelve, which stayed in production beside the 8 hp and 10 hp saloons. The 16 was a tax calculation, not an output figure. It had a healthy top speed of 75 mph, and in the bitterly cold winter of 1947 Alan Hess and a team of drivers took three on a publicity run for the company to seven northern European capitals.