The Bell & Colvill Heritage

Bell & Colvill have been selling and servicing cars from their showrooms for 40 years. Although nowadays the company is synonymous with Lotus, Subaru and Saab - the company have been involved in supporting a number of manufacturers with their sales activities. Brief potted history follows below:

Bell & Colvill open for business as a Lotus dealer in a 50/50 partnership on the 11th March 1970. Martin and Bobby had independently sold Lotus cars since 1965. Official franchises held detailed below:

• Lotus 1970-to date
• AC (3000ME - sometime in the 70's)
• BMW Motorcycles(!) - early 70's
• Alfa Romeo 1970-1983
• Jensen 1974-1979
• Maserati 1976-1979 and also again from 1985-1987
• Honda 1984-1994
• Subaru 1995-to date
• Saab 1981-to date

It was not purely franchised stuff - for a while some heavy exotics were on the forecourt - from Lamborghini Miuras to Ferrari Daytonas.

Oddball engineering highlights include the Alfa turbos we produced, RHD Alfa Romeo Spiders we converted and modified Lotus' of every description. We produced the Lotus Espirit Turbo two years before the factory and were the first company to see the tuning and trackday potential of the Elise and produced numerous special editions and trackday upgrade packages. Now of course the factory provide a comprehensive catalogue of goodies that we stock - but it is worth noting that when it comes to modern Lotus cars - if you want to talk to a company that have raced and tracked just about every derivative of Lotus, we can usually give you the benefit of hard won advice on what does and what doesn't(!) work on optimising these cars for the track.

We have consistently sold more Lotus' than any other dealer and have supplied cars to satisfied customers to Twickenham to Tobago! In fact we had a look at the books recently and reckon we have sold approximately 25,000 cars from our Bell & Colvill showrooms - so we must be doing something right!