Just
like the past few times I have been posting, I say “sorry it’s been a while
since my last post.” I would just like
to let you know that nothing has changed, so sorry it’s been a while since my
last post. However, I plan on making up
for it by bringing you not only a rare car, but probably one you might not have
even heard of before. Here I give to you
a 1958 or 1959 Elva Courier!
This
car is part of the Gabel Collection. I featured
a bunch of cars from here in the past before I started covering the Alaska
Collection. However, I still have a
bunch of cars left over, and this Elva Courier is one of them. Now, normally I don’t post THAT much in terms
of facts, but since this car is quite rare, I tried to gather some in the event
someone stumbles across this blog for actual research. The owner did tell me a bit, but I filmed
this quite some time ago. I will say the
Elva Courier Facebook page did help me out quite a bit.
So anyway,
back to this car: the 1958 or 1959 Elva Courier. Frank G. Nichols founded
Elva in 1955 and originally stated making race cars. He decided to make a street car based on
easily available components. This car
was the product. Apparently Nichols was
having some troubling exporting this British car to the US, so he said screw
that, and went back to making race cars.
This
car is number 23 of 200 original Nichols made Elva Couriers before the name was
sold off to another company. This car
has been sitting under a car cover, including one just for the interior, but
she’s pretty rough. The paint has
visible wear, the wheels are rough, and so on.
Mechanically, this car is supposed to be in good shape, but when we
tried to start her up, the battery decided it had better things to do, and she only turned over a couple times. I still think she
would have sputtered to life with a fresh battery based off of what I
heard. The owner did offer to jump it,
but this was near the end of my visit, so I declined because I didn’t want to
overstay my welcome.
Now,
I have been told this is a MK1. MK1s
have a flat windshield, and MK2s are curved, but I could not find any good
pictures online to tell me which was which.
Again, the Elva Courier Facebook page helped confirm the info, and
again, again, the owner did tell me all this stuff, but at this point, it was
so long ago. Normally a MK1, it has a
1.5 liter engine that apparently makes 72 horsepower. This would push the under 1600 pound car from
zero to sixty in 12.4 seconds, but the engine plate this car has proves it has
something different making it even rarer.
(Elva
Courier Specs)
This
is a pretty neat little car, but unless that battery gets charged, it’s going
to remain sitting, rotting in style. Don’t
forget to check out the video of this car below and make sure you subscribe to
our YouTube
channel. Also be sure like us on Facebook,
and be sure to follow us on Twitter
for some exclusive content! Thanks for
stopping by!
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