Rusty joy car fetches £3,400 at Diss auction

A rusty 1950s children’s pedal car, which was rescued from a shed, has sold for £3,400.

The Austin Junior J40 toy car sparked a bidding war when it went under the hammer at a toy sale auction at TW Gaze in Diss recently.

Auctioneers originally estimated it would fetch between £600 and £800 due to its battered condition. Buyers were not put off, however, and a bidding war ensued.

Lot number 5,001, which was made in England by Austin Motor Company in the 1950s, defied all the odds and eventually sold for £3,400.

Gaze toy expert Rupert Willows said: “We are scratching our heads over how much it sold for to be honest.”

A total of almost 32,000 J40s were produced from 1950 to 1971. They were made using off-cuts of metal supplied by Austin’s Longbridge factory.

Although the model was labelled ‘junior’ in sales catalogues, they were known an ‘joy cars’ by the Austin factory and came with a dummy engine, complete with spark plugs and leads, battery operated headlamps, horn and chrome trim.