Vauxhall Velox

Dinky made the Vauxhall Cresta and Corgi made the Vauxhall Velox. The two cars are very similar and I have to thank Wikipedia for helping me out with the difference. Both were pretty swish having big six cylinder engines but the Cresta was the more up-market version having two-tone paint, a heater and a clock as well as leather seats. So now you know. I also think Dinky did the facelift version with the larger rear window. Corgi though had windows and realistic silver wheels, while Dinky had no windows and painted hubs.

I like this model very much. The car was part of the original 1956 launch line up where it was in a range of single colours; red, cream, yellow and blue. In 1959 it was re-released under the same model number in two-tone red and yellow.

Corgi put some newness into the whole launch range by re-releasing several of the cars in two-tone, they had been around for 3 years and this gave them a bit of a lift. To my mind it worked. In terms of value, the colours are all fairly consistent - except for blue which gets a whopping premium.

In common with some of the other launch releases the Vauxhall Velox was also released during 1956 in a mechanical version with a friction drive motor. These were available in red or in orange. They were withdrawn in 1959.

The beige car below has been repainted. There are a number of clues to the fact that the car shown below is a sneaky repaint that the seller never bothered to mention in his eBay auction. Firstly the orange peel finish, but more than that the fact that the toy was never sold in this colour. Next the silver-painted bright work shows evidence of brushing rather than masking. That rear number plate is not from a Corgi accessory set, but the tax disc (lost in cleaning and now gone) was. The windows are far more worn than the bodywork, as are the wheels, the rivets look wrong and - killer blow, Corgi did not start painting tail lamps red until the Vanguard a year or so later. If that was not enough they've painted the wrong bit red. Still it's a good model of the old Vauxhall and the mechanical version is not that easy to find.