After 74 years, Alvis is back. And we've driven its old-new car

In purely rational terms, this is not the best car we’ll test this year. The steering has a big dead spot just off centre, the headlights do little more than deposit a puddle of golden light a couple of feet in front of the radiator grille and I’m really not sure I’d want to see one undergo an NCAP crash test. But I loved driving it – more than anything else I’ve driven for a very long time.

With all the fuss about Land Rover axing the Defender, and Jag’s decision to build another six Lightweight E-types, it’s been barely noticed that Alvis Cars, maker of grand prix and Le Mans cars in the Twenties and Thirties and of the Duke of Edinburgh’s man-about-town wheels in the Sixties, has restarted making its famous 4.3 again after 74 years.

Before the Luftwaffe flattened Alvis’s Coventry factory in 1940, the 4.3 made there was one of the fastest cars on sale anywhere in the world. One hit 119mph at Brooklands and even the saloon was the first production four-door capable of the ton. It was also hugely expensive. At £995, it was twice the price of a semi-detached house in Kenton, and it was hardly any cheaper than a Bugatti Type 57.

After the war, Alvis produced handsome two-door four-seaters that competed with the Aston Martins and Bentleys of their day until it knocked that on the head to focus purely on military vehicles. These included the deeply cool 6WD amphibious Stalwart and the Scimitar light tank. In the meantime, chaps in brown overall coats with chewed pencils behind their ears kept the old cars going, with spares, servicing and, increasingly, restoration.

Fast-forward to 2012, and the values of classic cars are going through the roof. A Bugatti Type 57 has sold for £24m, an Alvis 4.3 is worth £500,000 and TopGear is rhapsodising about the Eagle E-Type. The boys in the brown overalls, now led by the splendidly named Mr Stote, had a bit of an idea. They had all the original drawings from the Thirties and were already making most parts of the car as spares – what if they went the whole hog and built some new ones? Not, like an Eagle E-Type, an extra-thorough restoration/modification of an old car, but an actual new car, from the ground up.

The problem here, as Jaguar has discovered with the Lightweight E-types, is that you can’t just register a new car without having VOSA’s boffins perform a series of tests on it. God forbid there’s a spike or sharp corner on which to impale pedestrians. More challengingly, they make sure that the air coming out of the exhausts is as near as dammit cleaner than that going in, and that the car actually slows down when you push the middle pedal. None of these attributes were terribly important 70 years ago when there were so few cars on the road that one seldom had to brake for anything other than the occasional pretty young Wren officer needing a lift home.

But this was no problem to the chaps in brown overalls. Having given their pencils a chew, they used them to design a fuel- injection system and a disc-brake set-up. They rounded off a few sharp edges, put a special mount under the bonnet mascot so that it breaks off in an accident, and fitted discreet indicators, fog lights and seatbelts. They scanned various bits so that they could be made more accurately by CAD/CAM machines – but otherwise built the car just as in 1940.

Which leads me behind the wheel of the first brand-new Alvis in 50 years. It’s a beautiful thing, with bodywork designed by coachbuilders Vanden Plas, long before the name became forever associated with walnut picnic table-equipped Allegros. The Alvis has got that indefinable quality of stance. It was built to look like it was going fast even when it was sitting still, and, in a Doc Hudson sort of way, it’s still got it.

Low suicide doors open into a snug cockpit, dominated by the biggest steering wheel you’ve ever seen. A shotgun pattern of gauges, scripted in a beautiful typeface, stretch across a flat dash, with the speedo in just the right place to frighten the aforementioned Wren. You climb in, if that’s the right word, as, even with seatbelts, you feel very exposed, with the doors not coming much past your waist and the windscreen being wrapped in conspicuously slender pillars.

On the steering wheel are a hand throttle and a lever for advancing and retarding the ignition – needed for starting in 1940 but irrelevant today. Now, you simply turn the key and push the button. Instantly, the big straight-six fires up and settles into a steady, if slightly clattery, idle. Blip the throttle, and the response is immediate and surprisingly throaty. With the clutch pedal down (thanks to the Alvis engineers who moved it into the conventional far-left position a few years before the 4.3 was originally developed) and the short-throw gearbox slipped into first (thanks to those same engineers for being the first to fit an all-synchro gearbox), you’re away.

The first thing you notice is the heavy steering at low speed – hence that enormous steering wheel to help you lever it about. The second is the quite simply fantastic sight before you – there are no big, fat pillars to impede your view down the long bonnet and past the huge chrome mascot atop the radiator grille, landscape and sky reflected in the back of the domed Lucas P100 headlights. The third is that there is virtually no view backwards, other than over your shoulder.

The reaction from other drivers is quite unlike that in any modern car. Drive a Lambo through Kenilworth and you’ll get plenty of looks, but also some hand gestures. In the Alvis, everyone turns and stares, with reactions varying from a youthful grin to more knowledgeable full-on double takes, especially when they spy the 13 plates. When you’re in an Alvis, no one cuts you up, tailgates you and you always get let into traffic. You smoke along like the star of one of those irritatingly upbeat music videos.

Even the steering becomes part of the pleasure. To start with, it’s a struggle to place the car accurately but, as time goes by, you learn to lean against the edge of the dead spot and to wind on a little bit more lock as the car leans and the suspension geometry changes. Alvis will fit modern rack- and-pinion steering, but I think that would be missing the point. Even though the gearbox has synchromesh, it’s no Mazda MX-5 rifle bolt. But if you don’t hurry it, and match the revs a little, it slides through as sweetly as anything. Again, I would opt for the original gearbox (albeit with an electric overdrive to drop the revs on the motorway) rather than the modern six-speed that Alvis offers.

And that engine really is a peach, pulling cleanly and strongly from low revs with a cultured growl. On the open road, it really turns into a joy. Every gearchange, steering input, braking manoeuvre and throttle application requires concentration. But get it right, and you make swift, smooth progress – not Nissan GT-R progress, but hugely satisfying. That said, even though the car was still a relatively recent invention when the Alvis was designed, it’s got easily enough performance to keep up and often pass modern metal, much to the surprise and, often, pleasure of the overtaken driver.

A 1938 4.3 would do the same but, according to the handbook, required fairly intensive servicing every few hundred miles. If you’re 60 or more, the odds are that you grew up having to fettle your own car, but most of us have done little but occasionally check the oil and water. It is due to this that, even while values are rocketing, use of classic cars appears to be dropping.

As I barrel down the outside lane of the M40, it occurs to me that you’d have to have no petrol at all in your veins not to love this car. It gives you all the joys of a classic car and the kudos of being built to original plans by its original maker, but without requiring its owner to have a degree in oily-bit furtling. At under £250k, it’s half the price of an old one, and you can even opt for hidden upgrades such as aircon, halogen headlight bulbs and a modern infotainment system. Maybe it’s not such an irrational choice after all…

This feature originally appeared in the Top Gear magazine Retro supplement. Photography by Joe Windsor-Williams