Ralph Lucas

The Ralph Lucas was an English automobile manufactured by its namesake from 1901 until around 1908. The first model was an odd two-stroke car powered by paraffin; it had a piston and a crankshaft at either end of its one cylinder. A button in the steering wheel controlled the speed of the engine. The coachwork was of pressed steel. The two-stroke design introduced in 1908 was the origin of the Valveless.

It was test driven for an article in The Engineer journal which reported, 'On the high gear the car travelled up long and steep gradients without necessitating change to the low gear’ it wrote, hailing the vehicle as ‘a highly meritorious attempt to adapt a two-cycle internal combustion engine to the propulsion of road vehicles.’