Lightburn Zeta: a little-known Australian car

Lightburn & Co was an Adelaide-based successful manufacturer of washing machines, cement mixers, wheel barrows and jacks for cars as well as fibreglass boats. Harold Lightburn had since the end of WWII harboured the idea of manufacturing a car suitable for city commuting and had actually begun exploring the idea with some seriousness in the early 1950s.

He and one or two senior engineers toyed with various concepts throughout the 50s and by 1959 they had arrived at their definitive vehicle—a station wagon-like vehicle of great utility with a fibreglass body over a simple tubular steel chassis, a Villiers two-stroke engine of 324c capacity driving the front wheels through a four-speed gearbox with a motorcycle-like sequential gearshift. It went on sale in late 1963.

Promoted as "Australia's own second car" it was intended to be transport for mums who had kids to take to school, shopping to be done and all those seemingly insignificant errands that mums make every day. From a size point of view the Zeta was right but the lack of access from the rear—there was no hinged rear window, for example—took the gloss off the shine and it must be said that the driving experience was nothing to write home about. The Villiers engine developed a puny 16.5 bhp which in itself was a limitation and getting used to the gearshift was an acquired art that many failed to do. The Zeta's party trick was to have four speeds in reverse simply by stopping, turning off the engine and then switching the ignition the other way to reverse the polarity!

Lightburn entered 3 Zetas in the 1964 Ampol Trial and was rewarded with the Meritorious Performance Prize for the car with an engine capacity of less than 350cc. Earlier in the same year a Zeta Runabout was driven non-stop from Newcastle (NSW) to Adelaide and averaged 44mph and returned 41mpg with apparently no breakdowns. It was an attempt to prove to the Australian public that the tiny Zeta was capable of withstanding the torture of our roads but it carried little currency with buyers.

The problem for Lightburn and the Zeta was the arrival in 1961 of the Morris 850 aka the Mini. It did all that the Zeta did but it was packaged in the body that buyers had empathy with and had a "proper" engine up front, plus it was being sold and backed by the huge British Motor Corporation and its extensive dealer network.

By the end of 1965 Lightburn had ceased making the Zeta Runabout—324 were made—as well as around 48 Zeta Sports. Today they are merely a pause in the history of making cars in Australia.