AV

Ward & Avey acquired John Carden's Teddington factory and Monocar design in 1919 and put the lightweight machine into production under the initials AV. The Somerset Road works employed as many as eighty people, unusually substantial scale for a postwar cyclecar concern. Its first Monocar placed one occupant in a 30-inch-wide pointed hull weighing about 550 lb, with a rear-mounted motorcycle engine and chain drive. Bodies supplied by Thames Valley Pattern Works could be made from wood, plywood or compressed paper. The tandem Bi-car followed in 1920 and the more conventional side-by-side Runabout in 1921. Across the family, buyers could receive JAP, Blackburne or occasionally MAG air-cooled engines and either a two-speed epicyclic or three-speed Sturmey-Archer transmission. Several hundred Monocars and about fifty Bi-cars were built; sources do not securely quantify the Runabout. Ward & Avey became A.V. Motors Ltd in 1923. Regular automobile production ended in 1924, although Runabouts were reportedly completed later to special order, and the business continued as a Jowett and subsequently Rootes-group dealer rather than creating further AV models.

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