page_title: British Motor Syndicate
section_title: Collapse
hierarchical_section_title: British Motor Syndicate / Collapse
caption_attribution_description: English: Parlour's hansom p. 272 s:Omnibuses and Cabs
context_page_description: The British Motor Syndicate Limited was a company formed in November 1895 by company promoter and entrepreneur Harry John Lawson. Lawson's aim was to use BMS to raise funds from the public to establish a business with a monopoly on petrol-driven cars by acquiring as many patents as possible related to such vehicles from Gottlieb Daimler, his business associates, and other sources.
  It was never the company's intention to produce motor cars, but rather to exploit the patents it had purchased by charging substantial royalties to automobile manufacturers for the right to manufacture cars using those patents.
context_section_description: Lawson's plan did indeed have a dampening effect on the fledgling British automobile industry. Herbert Austin, for instance, abandoned the development of his first Wolseley because of its too close similarity to a vehicle the patent for which was owned by BMS. But BMS ultimately failed, most obviously because of a 1901 court decision that gutted its business model, by which time rapid improvements in technology had made the company's patents obsolete in any case.
  State of the Art 1896
caption: Electric cab
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