This is the oldest four-wheeled motor car in the Museum’s collection and is a prototype affectionately nicknamed ‘Owl’, inspired by its distinctive registration number.

Herbert Austin, who eventually went on to found his own motor company at Longbridge in Birmingham, designed this prototype car (his first four-wheeled vehicle) for Wolseley Sheep Shearing Machine Company to try and diversify and stabilise the business.

He drove this car in the Thousand Miles Trial in 1900 and was awarded first prize in his class. He completed the whole course at 12 mph in England and 10 mph in Scotland (the legal limits at the time), only matched by eleven other competing cars. It eventually went on display in 1912 when Britain’s first Motor Museum opened. The museum was the brainchild of Edmund Dangerfield, proprietor of The Motor magazine and hence was known as The Motor Museum. It was located in London, at Waring and Gillow's furniture store on Oxford Street.

This was Austin’s third vehicle design for Wolseley and it formed the basis of the production cars that were introduced in 1901. The gilled-tube radiator surrounding the engine was a trade-mark but was discarded, together with horizontal transverse engines, when Austin left the company in 1905. The car has a single-cylinder engine, tiller steering, belt drive to a centrally mounted gearbox and chain drive to the rear wheels.