AutoCult Lysell Rally (1951) (Norway)

About the Original

The bustling Swede

Born in Stockholm in 1907, Swede Rolf Ake Nystedt, better known by his American name Ralph Lysell, moved to Norway in 1949 and took his designs for various automobiles with him. He was helped by the fact hat after World War II the import restrictions mad it increasingly difficult to import cars into Norway and thus offered to set up a state-owned production facility.

For this reason, his plans for a sports car, a truck and even a specially designed taxi apparently met with sufficient interest to find financiers in 1950. Ralph Lysell first devoted himself to the realization of this sports car. Under the type abbreviation Rally – composed of the initial letters of his name – he began to build a prototype in the aircraft factory ‘Norwegian Aircraft Industries LTD’. Striking was that he mainly used aluminum parts that were originally intended for planned aircraft production. However, as this production never reached series production, many light metal parts were still stored in the factory halls. Ralph Lysell, 43, put a least four cars on its wheels at the plant in Fornebu (Oslo) in 1950; other sources also mention five cars. He designed the chassis for his prototypes himself and built a powerful U.S. engine from Ford. According to his plans, he wanted to mass-produce the chassis and the car body in Norway and to source the engines from either the USA or Germany. In a newspaper interview, he said that he had already received 15 orders for 1951. In the same newspaper, he also announced that for his the next project he planned to produce a special taxi with which he wanted to serve the Norwegian market with large quantities from 1952.

As Norway’s automotive history showed, both the production of the Rally sports car and the mass production of the taxi model came to nothing – and there was no longer even any mention of a truck.