The early 1900s were a chaotic and thrilling time for transportation. Engineers and entrepreneurs across the world were racing to define what the automobile would look like, how it would move, and who would build it. Most of these experiments failed. A few changed everything. And some, like the tricars built by Harry J. Lawson, fell somewhere in between — bold in concept, troubled in execution, and still fascinating more than a century later.
Harry J. Lawson was not a man who worked small. He was deeply embedded in the early British automotive world, having been involved in major ventures including Coventry-Motette, the Great Horseless Carriage Company, Daimler, and New Beeston. He wasn’t just an investor — he was a driving force behind the push to bring motorized transport to Britain. His ambitions were enormous, and so was his willingness to spend money backing ideas he believed in.
Lawson’s tricars were built between 1900 and 1901 at the Crypto works. The design itself wasn’t homegrown. Lawson had purchased it from a man named Pennington for the staggering sum of £100,000. At the turn of the century, that was an extraordinary amount of money — enough to signal that this wasn’t a casual experiment. Lawson genuinely believed this design had the potential to reshape personal transport.
The original tricar placed the engine behind the rear wheel, with power delivered to that wheel through a belt. It was an unconventional arrangement. Most motorized vehicles of the time were still borrowing heavily from carriage design, so a belt-driven, rear-engine tricar stood out immediately. Only a small number of these vehicles were ever produced, and their time on the road was brief.
In 1901, Lawson’s team attempted to correct the flaws in the original design with a significant mechanical revision. The new version repositioned the engine to one side of the front fork, with the flywheel placed on the opposite side. The reasoning was straightforward: by splitting the weight across the fork, the vehicle would handle better and run more smoothly. It was a radical departure from anything else on the road at the time.
The engineering required to pull this off was intricate. Placing an engine and flywheel on opposing sides of a front fork introduced a range of mechanical challenges that were difficult to solve with the manufacturing tools and materials available in 1901. The balance the designers were aiming for was theoretically sound, but making it work in a real, rideable vehicle was another matter entirely.
Neither version of the tricar found commercial success. The first design’s belt-driven rear engine arrangement proved impractical. The second design, despite its clever rethinking of weight distribution, ran into the same wall: the technology of the era simply wasn’t refined enough to support such an unconventional layout at any meaningful scale. Manufacturing complex, bespoke vehicles in small numbers was expensive, and the market had little appetite for machines that weren’t yet proven.
What makes Lawson’s tricars worth remembering isn’t their commercial record — it’s what they represent. At a time when no one had agreed on what a motor vehicle should even look like, engineers were free to try almost anything. Lawson’s machines were proof of that freedom. The £100,000 Pennington design, the belt-driven rear engine, the fork-mounted flywheel — each of these choices reflected a genuine attempt to solve the puzzle of personal motorized transport from an entirely fresh angle. The puzzle wasn’t solved this time, but the attempt itself was part of what pushed the whole industry forward.
