The Talbot 8/18: the finest Vintage light car?

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Light cars are a byword for simplicity, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for refinement. If a little tweak here and there can make a big improvement, so much the better. Louis Coatalen was not a man with a retrograde outlook, and while other light cars were plodding along with their sturdy sidevalve lumps, he designed one with such advanced features as overhead valves, water-pump cooling and coil ignition as early as 1921.

The Talbot 8/18 wasn’t just an intelligently-engineered addition to the Talbot range—it was a vitally important development on which the Kensington car-maker’s life depended. As the market for large, luxurious cars dwindled after the Great War and the light-car boom set in, Talbot found itself failing to shift its large, unsaleable Edwardian relics, and it was on the cusp of failure when the 8/18 was hurried through development and into production.

The little 8hp just succeeded in propping Talbot up until Georges Roesch’s marvellous 14/45 was launched into the more prosperous world of 1927. It was lively, fairly if not cheaply priced, and economical to run with its engine of just 970cc. It would whizz along at 45mph, and therein lay its brilliance—it was an 8hp with the performance of a 10 or 12hp.

Still, Talbot couldn’t compete with Austin and Morris and, after a promising first year, sales dwindled. Today, just 12 8/18s survive. Zack Stiling tries the prototype for size in the December issue of The Automobile, on sale now.

Words by Zack Stiling
Photographs by Tony Baker

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