IAD Royale
Did you know that British motor industry has a long history of building luxury cars?
You may have heard of Rolls-Royce and Bentley, but there have been several coachbuilders known for fine luxury cars: Abbott, Barker, Corsica, Freestone & Webb, Gurney Nutting, Hamshaw, Harrington, Hooper & Co., James Young, Jensen Motors, Mulliner & Co., Park Ward, Thrupp & Maberly, Vanden Plas, and more.
Look those up now, and you’ll notice they’re mostly all dead.
Why do the proportions look strange? There’s a real reason…keep reading and I’ll tell ya! IAD press photos of the Royale • IAD
In 1988, when the IAD Royale debuted, those companies were also, mostly, dead.
Now you’re thinking, “OK, so if we’re talking about fine British coachbuilding here, what chassis is the Royale based on?”
Obviously, a Subaru XT / Alcyone.
You know, the wedgy 2.7-liter flat-6, all-wheel-drive coupe from the 1980s, with the pop-up headlights, and the gun handle shifter, and that hardly anyone bought.
Here, it’s stretched and dressed with the finest four-door styling that the (once, actually, massive) UK design consultancy could muster. No shade here to IAD, its past portfolio about as fine as any other styling house. More on this in a minute.
Interior details of the IED Royale • IED
Because I’m me, I couldn’t stop at the tiny handful of photos I could find from around the internet, and end my quest at the limp lettuce factoid of it having approximately 145 horsepower to haul around a business park’s worth of late-’80s tech, including mobile phone, fax machine, hi-fi stereo, and a navigation system.
Its front seat controls retained the pistol grip shifter (now trimmed in white leather), next to main controls grouped onto, surely, a jacuzzi tub control panel.
Some of these buttons controlled an LED display between the rear lights could show pre-programmed messages to other drivers, inexplicably including ones such as: “Ice on the road”, “Please pass carefully”, “I’m being stolen” and “Have a nice day”.
