Bluebird Automotive

The company was incorporated in South Wales as Redi-51 Limited on 12 March 2001, renamed Bluebird Automotive Industries that April, Bluebird Automotive Group in November and Bluebird Automotive Limited in November 2002. Its opportunity came from Golden Vale Dairies at Bridgend, whose ageing doorstep-delivery fleet could no longer be replaced because established British milk-float manufacture had effectively disappeared. Bluebird director Richard Rees engaged Paul Sparrow of Amalfi Designs, and by July 2002 the team had presented a replacement proposal; two vehicles were subsequently delivered to Golden Vale, although their exact designations and delivery date are not securely preserved. Bluebird lacked resources for volume manufacture and pursued a joint vehicle company with Llandaff Engineering interests. That relationship produced Q Electric Vehicles and later a complex trademark dispute over QEV, QEV70, QEV90 and QEV120. Bluebird promoted QEV70 as a modular 73-volt electric delivery platform with interchangeable batteries, payloads up to roughly 2.2 tonnes and range options up to 100 miles. QEV90 and the 7.5- to 10-tonne QEV120 remained development proposals. The separate XDV was commissioned for Express Dairies; at least one 55-mph example was trialled at Northampton and used for Parcelforce deliveries. Bluebird also partnered with Llandaff Engineering and Amalfi Designs on the 150-kW Electron E150, which averaged 73.39 mph at Bruntingthorpe in August 2003 to set the electric milk-float speed record. Despite these prototypes and trials, no sustained production run followed. Creditors resolved to wind the insolvent company up in 2007, liquidators were appointed on 1 March, and the legal entity was dissolved in 2010. The catalog ends operational history in 2007 while retaining the later legal dissolution in narrative. It distinguishes the five named Bluebird vehicle programs, does not invent identities for the two unnamed Golden Vale deliveries, and excludes Bluebird Electric 1—the 1996 Don Wales/Bluebird Electric record car that predates and is organizationally separate from Bluebird Automotive—as well as Nissan Bluebird cars and American Blue Bird buses.

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