The Atomic age: celebrating 25 years of Ariel

Simon Saunders is proud of his achievement, although you would hardly know it in conversation. He’s too busy thinking ahead, plotting future products with his design and engineering staff of half a dozen. He has revelled in being small but believes that for future “sweet-spot” efficiency Ariel may need to grow a little bigger, making around 150-160 vehicles per year and employing 50-60 people in total.

Plans are afoot for a larger and better-planned factory. Whatever happens, Ariel will grow into a company that is capable of making highly desirable cars for the electrified era. Saunders may be celebrating a milestone, but his main interest is looking forward.

The Ariel idea was born when Saunders, who had been a designer for GM, Porsche and Aston Martin among others, took a job as a senior lecturer in design at Coventry University.

An Autocar-backed assignment for students to create a car with Caterham Seven appeal – that wasn’t anything like a Caterham Seven – produced a vehicle with no screen or doors and a prominent tubular spaceframe, called LSC, for Lightweight Sports Car.

A model of the car was shown at the 1993 Birmingham motor show, and Saunders and a student-partner, Niki Smart, set out to investigate the car for production.

“One of the most productive things you can do with a one-off car proposal is complete it to see the flaws, then build it again,” says Saunders. “The LSC was promising, but it was too small. We built another one in a studio attached to my house, and that’s where the Atom was truly born.”

The first Rover K-series-engined car was sold in 2000. Cars were made in small numbers for around two years, before the Atom was redesigned for the Honda Civic Type R engine. Then came a supercharged version, an Atom 3 (its frame was redesigned for rigidity and comfort), and after that the slicker Atom 4.

An Atom 5 is under consideration, but Saunders believes his skeletal creation may have reached a watershed. Electrification regulations mean Ariel need not embrace full battery power for most of a decade, although Ariel began experimenting years ago and already knows much about the electric cars it will build when the time comes.

Saunders is contemplating both a model that can continue the Atom 4 performance journey and possibly a simpler and more affordable car that recalls the simplicity of the Atom 1. “Our Atom entry level is in the mid-£50,000s,” he says, “and we often sell specially equipped cars costing over £100,000. But I look at that original car’s appeal and wonder if we should be doing something like that.”

Continuing demand for Atom 4s and 4Rs is so strong that there’s no need to hurry any ‘Atom Junior’ plan. But history says once a plan forms in Simon Saunders’ highly productive brain, it tends to progress with surprising speed.

Thus only a fool would bet against a simplified Atom, perhaps shaving £10,000 or even £15,000 off the future ruling prices, appearing in the future. There’s already one of us in the queue. 

Evolution of the Atom

All four Atoms, back to back, then. It’s rare one gets the chance to do this; I think it’s rare that engineers and marketers even in big car companies get to do this – to take a raft of previous models and see if the latest ones are still holding true to the ethos set by their forebears.

An Atom surely is, though – no? Even placing an Atom 1 and 4 together, they could only be one thing: evolving takes on Ariel’s original sportster. And despite the differences in engineering, they honestly don’t look so dissimilar. Someone uninitiated might not tell them apart.

Don’t be deceived. I’ve driven an Atom 4 quite a bit in the past couple of years, but not a 1 since, well, I can’t remember. And having become used to the way 4s go down the road, clambering into a 1 for the first time in comfortably over a decade (or, gulp, maybe two…) comes as a surprise. 

It’s easier to climb in over its smaller frame, I don’t feel quite so ensconced once inside it (or whatever passes for ‘inside’ an Atom) and there’s nowhere to brace my left foot.

But it’s absolutely Atomy. Or Atomish. Atomic, perhaps? The driving position is good, and the one-piece seat is more supportive than I remember, especially around the shoulders. But fire it up and get rolling and the experience is, if you had to describe it in a word, fizzy.

The Atom 1 had a 1.8-litre Rover K-series engine mounted directly to the chassis. And while it’s a good, lightweight, responsive engine, it’s a bit rorty and its every vibration directs back through the chassis and into these unpadded seats. Throttle response is light – actually the pedal is a bit too light and responsive – and, while you get back what you put in, you don’t have to put in very much to get it revving.

The ride is lively and connected, too. Bouncy is the wrong word, but there’s an alertness to the whole thing. The steering is quick – I don’t know if the ratio is actually any quicker than that of today’s car, but if anything it’s overly responsive off the straight-ahead.

Directional stability, especially once you throw in a bad road with some off-cambers and lumps, leaves something to be desired. The feeling, slightly, is one of being along for the ride. But overall it feels narrow, compact, smaller than today’s Atom, so you have some space in your lane you can play with.

With ‘only’ 118bhp an Atom 1 isn’t fast by today’s standards, but we’re still talking about a car with more than 200bhp per tonne, so it zips along quite briskly. Brisk enough for modern roads. The gearshift takes some precision: it’s short, quite heavy and narrowly spaced. But while it’s harder to drive than I remember the more modern Atoms being, there’s a real innocence about its enthusiasm.

The 1 felt very well finished at the time (if you choose to put this much engineering on display, it had to be), so it still stands up well now.

When you climb into an Atom 2, things aren’t vastly different. This, though, was the first Atom to receive a 2.0-litre 160bhp Honda engine. It’s still connected directly to the chassis, but there’s perhaps a more general smoothness to it: the fact that this car doesn’t vibrate like an ultrasonic tooth cleaner marks the biggest difference between Atoms 1 and 2.

It’s a little more refined all around, clearly the product of a company that knew it was onto a winning formula but which wanted an improved version. It’s between 2 and 3, and 3 and 4, where you see bigger differences.

The Atom 3 introduced compliant engine mounts and the new engine brought balance shafts. With an entirely new chassis, including the suspension, the driving position – always something that appealed to bigger drivers who couldn’t get into a Caterham – was even more accommodating, too.

This 3, a later 3.5R, is the 3 at its best. And its most ferocious, owing to a 350bhp supercharged 2.0-litre Honda Civic Type R engine along with pneumatic paddle shifters that fire gearshifts through with the sound of an air rifle. Its steering is calmer than previously, the ride is more composed.

If it only had 118bhp you would think it was an Atom tamed, but the potency of this one means you still feel like you’re hanging onto its coat-tails if you give it everything. But it just adds more coherence to its make-up than the 2. It’s a more rounded car.

Driving a 3, I might not have believed it was possible to increase the plushness by so much again when the 4 landed, but there’s a further big leap between the Atom 3 and Atom 4 in terms of isolation and refinement.

The 4 is still a lightweight, engaging, involving and lively car, I need to say. But with a bigger chassis that uses thicker-diameter tubing that is more of a climb to get over and which feels like you’re sitting deeper within, allied to lighter steering and a tighter turning circle, it immediately feels like a more mature car.

There’s even a reversing camera. On the move its turbocharged engine softens the edges of its throttle response, and it has a much lighter, longer-throw gearshift than previous Atoms. 

Its ride is now truly compliant and absorbent, its steering responsive but free from kickback. The 4 has less power than the 3.5R, but because its 320bhp arrives in a leisurely, broad fashion – and because the chassis is pliant enough to easily put that power to the road – this is surely the fastest Atom bar none, as well as the least demanding.