When Colonel William Rolleston took delivery of his new car from the Bristol Motor Co in 1906, he could have had little concept of what the traffic in Bristol would be like a century later. In 1904 there were 28,842 vehicles registered in Great Britain - in 2005 there were five times this figure in Bristol alone.

The Colonel's car is a Bristol 16/20 Touring car very similar in lots of ways to the horse-drawn carriage that it replaced but instead of a coachman the Colonel employed a chauffeur, Mr Harold King. On the rare occasions he went out in it he probably encountered more carriages than cars on the road. It probably broke down fairly often and its tyres were prone to puncture and as there were few petrol stations at that time carrying a spare can of fuel was a necessity. By the time Rolleston sold it in 1921, the number of cars on the road in the UK had increased enormously, to 950,000. New styles of construction had emerged from America where Henry Ford pioneered mass production and World War 1 was a huge spur to technological improvement. Cars had changed so much that no-one wanted the Colonel's old-fashioned Bristol and so it was converted into a pick-up truck.