Ariel Nomad | PH Used Buying Guide

• Available for £45,000, maybe
• 2.4-litre petrol inline four, naturally aspirated or supercharged, rear-wheel drive
• Not many other off-roaders are as hilarious to drive
• Hard to get in and out of, and it won’t keep you dry
• Gratifyingly low on electrical stuff to go wrong
• Owners tend to keep them, so there’s not much choice on the used market  

Believe it or not, Simon Saunders’ Somerset-based company Ariel has been around since 1991, but the big year was 1999 when the Ariel Motor Company was formed and their first vehicle, the Atom, was announced. It was like nothing else on the road. An open-wheeled, exo-skeletoned high-performance car first mocked up as a concept by Smart and with, initially at least, no windscreen or much in the way of body panelling, the Atom had no real competitors. It was a pure driving machine for those who wanted to enjoy the hell out of life on the road and who didn’t mind getting wet in the process. The Atom’s waiting list jumped from six months to 28 months after Clarkson’s face was distorted by one in 2004.

Depending on the customer’s requirements it took at least 120 hours to assemble each car, or twice that with lots of options added, compared to the 15 or so hours it took a mainstream manufacturer to pop out a family hatchback. The stream of components arrived at Ariel’s Crewkerne facility from a hundred or so suppliers, British wherever possible. The engine came from Honda, who were still operating in Swindon in 2015 and as such were honorarily British. The tubular steel chassis came from Arch Motors in Cambridgeshire.

Ariel would eventually be building a hundred cars and thirty Honda 1200 V4-powered Ace motorcycles every year. After assembly and checking, each vehicle was put through the Individual Vehicle Approval process which exempted Ariel from the fabulously expensive type approval hoops that ordinary manufacturers had to jump through. After a 45-mile test it was ready for delivery, complete with the specific assembler’s signature on a triangular plate so you knew exactly who to ask for when you wanted to have a conversation about your car or bike. Even if you somehow lost the plate it wasn’t hard to trace your builder as there were only thirty workers to choose from.

Quite a few of those thirty Ariel folk were known to enjoy bashing around in the dirt on various forms of transport, powered or otherwise, so Ariel MD Henry Siebert Saunders didn’t have too much trouble getting the workforce motivated for his Nomad 1, the subject of this week’s buyer’s guide. The Nomad was the follow-up vehicle for anyone who believed in the Atom philosophy and who was up for getting muddy as well as wet. Like the Atom, it was made by hand, or to be strictly accurate two hands, both of which belonged to the same person. The ‘production line’ was therefore exactly the same length as one Nomad. It was powered not by the Atom’s K20 2.0-litre Type R unit but by the more torquey K24 2.4-litre i-VTEC four. 

The build process allowed Ariel to declare the basic Nomad finished at what some might consider to be a fairly rudimentary level. It was good, though, because that policy allowed buyers to create their own custom vehicle by choosing from an extended menu of options the like of which you rarely saw on any other car. Not just the sort of bolt-on accessories that you might see on similar vehicles – winches, luggage racks and the like – but options that altered the core of the Ariel in key areas like the drivetrain, chassis and body (what there was of it). 

Whatever you ended up with in the way of a finished vehicle, it worked. A Nomad with the £2k Road Pack containing all the right lights and switchgear was effectively a road-legal Baja bug for the byways and the badlands of Barnstaple, Barnsley and Basingstoke. A 235hp Nomad driven by one of Ariel’s dev guys was faster around Powys’s infamous Sweet Lamb offroad track than a Group N all-wheel drive Mitsubishi Evo IX driven flat out by Wales Rally class-winner Tony Jardine. 

Shortly after the straight 2.4 came out, the Nomad Supercharged (or 300) was announced. As the name strongly implied this had a supercharger bolted onto it, albeit not the same supercharger used on the blown Atom. The one in the Nomad was set up to deliver more bottom-end torque. On paper, the unblown-to-blown increases weren’t huge – 290hp up from 235hp, and 251lb ft up from 221lb ft – but they were very meaningful in a car that only weighed 690kg. That and the availability of big grunt from basement revs gave it a remarkably high fun factor. 

Then there was the Nomad R (pictured). Described by many a flush-faced car journo as the maddest car ever built, the R was what happened when you left a Nomad and an Atom 3.5 R in the same shed overnight. Unlike the normal Nomad Supercharged, the R actually did use the blown Atom engine, giving it slightly less torque at 243lb ft but 45hp more power at 335hp. The transmission was a low-geared Sadev sequential dog box with closely stacked straight-cut gears and a pneumatic shift mechanism operated by a single steering wheel paddle (pull for upshifts, push for downshifts). There was a clutch pedal, but you only needed that to get going. 

The R’s top speed was 134mph. It could conceivably have gone faster with a different gearbox but you were fighting a losing battle with the air at 134mph. Nomad life at much more than 50mph was pretty noisy and some said there was a good possibility of the high-profile all-terrain tyres delaminating at speeds over 130mph. 

The upsides of the Sadev box were unfeasibly relentless acceleration, the 0-60 coming up in a breathless 2.9 seconds, and the opportunity it gave you to hone your left-foot braking skills, leaning the R over at crazy angles and wondering how much fun it was actually possible to have in a car while your trousers were still in place. All that was assuming you had the £77,000 asking price and your name was on the order list, which was just five cars long. The only example to go on the used market was the press car, advertised at just over £92,000 in late 2021 with just over 1,000 or just under 2,000 miles on it (there was some confusion about that). In March 2022 it was for sale again, advertised by Romans with another 400 miles on the clock and a new £100k price tag.  

Getting back to planet Earth, as we speak in mid-2024 the Nomad 2 is about to land. The steering wheel, pedal box and fuel cap are the same as the Nomad 1’s but everything else is different. The Honda engine is being replaced by the 305hp/382lb ft 2.3 turbo from Ford’s Focus ST. If you don’t want the standard six-speed manual gearbox in it you can have a Quaife sequential. The 2’s new chassis is 65 per cent stiffer than the 1’s, with a tweaked tubework layout that permits considerably easier entry and exit than was the case with the Nomad 1. The 2 will have 50 per cent more travel in the suspension, 40 per cent bigger brakes, and beadlock wheels.

The base price for the Nomad 2 is reportedly £68,000, which is more than twice the £33,000 cost of a Nomad 1 in 2015. We’re not sure exactly how many Nomads there are out there, but we think that the number of cars built between 2015 and 2020 was around two hundred so you can make your own guess from that. Demand for new Nomads has always outpaced supply, and naturally that has knocked on to the used market where Nomads of any description are hard to find and prices for the ones that are out there are high. 

Ariel itself is a popular sales hub for owners looking to trade in their cars, which further restricts the number of Nomads on the open market. We found just three cars outside the Ariel portal in July 2024, two of them Superchargeds priced at £58k for a 2016 car and £76k for a 2019 example. None of the three had breached the 6,000-mile mark yet, reflecting their ‘high days and holidays’ use. The only unblown Nomad we spotted at the time of writing was a 2017 5,000-miler at just under £52k.

Engine: 2,354cc, four-cyl
Transmission: 6-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 235@7,200rpm
Torque (lb ft): 221@4,300rpm
0-60mph (secs): 3.4
Top speed (mph): 125
Weight (kg): 670kg before options, 725kg with a typical selection
MPG (unofficial): about 26mpg
Wheels (inch): 15 or 18
On sale: 2015 – on
Price new: £33,000 (2015)
Price now: from £52,000

Note for reference: car weight and power data are hard to pin down with absolute certainty. For consistency, we use the same source for all our guides. We hope the data we use is right more often than it’s wrong. Our advice is to treat it as relative rather than definitive.

The Nomad’s Honda K24 i-VTEC engine is one of the most highly regarded for reliability. It’s capable of handling more than 400hp in turbocharged form. PHer Olly has a thread going here about his turboed Nomad which was producing up to 380hp/345lb ft with switchable maps. 

K24 front crankshaft seals can leak oil and the cam lobes can be a source of friction-based clicking from the top end. Keeping the oil fresh is a good idea on any car and that certainly applies to the K24. Some K24s can suffer from vibration but that will usually turn out to be something simple like a fouled plug or a busted engine mount rather than an expensive internal balancing problem. In the unlikely event of the motor blowing up you can source a complete used one on the internet for about a grand. 

The slick 6-speed manual gearbox was non-negotiable but £1,100 bought you a seven per cent shorter final drive which boosted your acceleration without affecting the top speed. £1,200 paid for a heavy-duty clutch including a K20 flywheel, while £1,000 got you an oil cooler system in the engine bay. A cat bypass pipe was £110. If you had a naturally aspirated K24 you could turn it into a Supercharged 300 by buying the £4,300 kit for that, but in that case you’d also need the heavy-duty clutch and oil cooler. As of mid-2024 Ariel was quoting a 4-5 month wait for superchargers. 

If for some reason you don’t have an Ariel dealer in your neighbourhood, you could get the factory to pick it up, service it and return it in one of their covered transporters, maybe reducing the costs on that by piggybacking with another nearby Ariel owner. Alternatively you could get your local mechanic to order up an Ariel servicing kit. For the 4,500-mile/annual service this includes engine oil and filter, transmission fluid, gearbox and sump washers, a fuel filter, and brake fluid, and costs £192. The 18,000-mile/four-year service is more involved. You have to ring the factory about that.   

In a departure from the norm we’ll be talking about the Nomad’s cage chassis in the next Body section, because on a Nomad the chassis is effectively also the body. We’ll talk about chassis behaviour here though because that’s interesting. Nomad driver aids were conspicuous by their absence. There was no traction control, stability control, hill descent control, locking diffs, all-wheel drive or power steering. There wasn’t even any anti-lock braking, although the braking balance could be adjusted back to front on the fly if you paid £143 for a cockpit remote brake bias control. 

The standard springs with Bilstein dampers were very soft, the front ones being rated at a pillowy 200lb. The dual-rate coils did firm up with increased travel but even so with 300mm of ground clearance the amount of body roll on corners and of pitch and dive under braking and acceleration was heroic. So was the kickback through the steering wheel, but it was all part of the car’s personality. The squidgy suspension managed to keep enough rubber on the road to get you through just about anything, even when one of the tyres was in mid-air waving hello to open-mouthed bystanders.

Again the world was your oyster in terms of chassis configurability. Instead of the basic Bilsteins, customers could opt for adjustable Bilsteins, adjustable Ohlins, or if you were planning on more off-road use, adjustable Foxes. For even harder off-roaders there were competition spec high-strength wishbones with a rear strut brace. There was even an ‘ambidextrous chassis’ kit with bracketry for both right or left-hand drive to make your Euro jaunts easier. How many cars have that? 

You might have noticed we said ‘road’ a minute ago. The Nomad looked like a refugee from the Paris-Dakar or a stunt vehicle from Dune but it was just as accomplished on the tarmac, as many who have been overtaken by one on a track day will testify. You could improve the brakes on 235hp cars with drilled and slotted discs and upgraded pads, or you could go the whole hog with AP Racing four-piston calipers and 290mm ventilated discs, a £2k option that was well worth having on supercharged cars. A rally-style hydraulic handbrake to facilitate drifts and get you round hairpin bends even faster (or more spectacularly anyway) was £495. 

Four wheel and tyre packages were available. Three of them used 15-inch wheels and your choice of Yokohama Geolander tyres depending on what sort of road/off-road split you were looking at. There was also an 18-inch wheel set with 65 per cent road/35 per cent off-road rubber. All of them provided oversteer on request. Slow in, fast out was best practice, especially if you had a storage box and/or spare wheel mounted on the back. Loading up the largely unweighted front end going into a corner gave you a bit more grip there. Stainless steel fittings for the brake and clutch lines were a useful box to tick if you weren’t planning on blow-drying your Nomad after every outing. In fact you could have all the fixings made up in stainless. 

One owner reported a loud bang on hard braking followed by a soft pedal. It turned out that the front left caliper was dragging on the ground, held on by nothing more than the brake line. The brake carrier had completely sheared off. Ariel examined the car and found hairline cracks in both carriers. The firm were of the opinion that a previous owner may have overtightened the fixing bolts.

As noted earlier, the ‘body’ of a Nomad was different to that of just about any other car in that it was mainly a tubular chassis many of whose bigger gaps were filled in by panels made from traffic-cone plastic. Perspex side panels were a £540 extra but pretty much indispensable if you didn’t fancy having your nether regions painfully pebbledashed. 

As with the Atom, the Nomad’s bronze-welded chassis was built by Arch Motor. It was beefier than the Atom’s to cope with the off-road beastings that Ariel expected half of all Nomad owners to give it. Earlier on we talked about how the tubework design of the new Nomad 2 made it a lot easier to get in and out. That really needed to happen because more than a few Nomad 1 owners found it easier to climb in through the roof of their vehicles rather than through the side apertures – and if their Nomad had a roof rack on it, which many did, vertical entry simply wasn’t possible, so it was pour yourself in from the side or nothing. That required a fair degree of bodily suppleness.

Another regularly requested change that has been implemented for the new Nomad 2 was the provision of a visor below the optional array of four old-school round roof lights (£990 including mounting bar and driving light) to cut out the glare which could be a problem on the 1 at night. The 2’s new visor incorporates a neat set of rectangular LED spotlights and doubles up as a provider of two air streams, one for the intercooler and one for the engine.

Bash plates for the front of the car, the engine, coolant pipe, and centre tunnel weren’t a bad idea either. Like the chassis rail protection kit and battery retention strap, these were all extras. For the full Tamiya RC/dodgem look you could have an LED-illuminated whip with a marker light on top of it for £250. 

Not much to talk about here, as the Nomad didn’t really have an interior by the normal definition of that word. Even a windscreen wasn’t standard. Adding a heated one along with a set of washers and wipers added £1,600 to the invoice. If you weren’t keen on getting rained on there was a £420 fabric car cover with plastic windows and zip-up doors. It took five minutes to take it off and about half an hour to put it on. It still let water in so that’s presumably why they called it a car cover instead of the more hopeful sounding phrase ‘weather equipment’ used by the likes of Caterham. Still, in lieu of a heater it made the car a lot warmer inside in winter. 

The seats didn’t offer much in the way of support for your back but tieing in the seat sponge from a £25 high-back garden chair improved matters. Having to do that in a pricey motor like a Nomad seemed daft and yet at the same time somehow strangely appropriate.   

Given the physical entry requirements, a quick-release steering wheel was a sensible option at £190. A carbon fibre instrument panel was £200. The £40 cig lighter socket was useful for plugging in ancillaries like an aftermarket sat-nav, but using it for its original purpose, i.e. smoking, was a risky proposition in a Nomad. Nobody likes hot ash in their eyes. 

There was only one dedicated storage space. It was basically a plastic box at the front that was big enough for a mobile phone and its charger and maybe half a sandwich. You were better off using the box to carry bungee straps and string for lashing stuff down to other parts of the car. Most of the issues affecting modern cars are electrical, so the absence of most of that sort of gubbins in the Nomad’s ‘interior’ should stand it in good stead.  Nomad fuel caps got lost on a regular basis and Ariel’s solution was to sell you a full assembly but the aftermarket has responded with individual replacement caps. 

Growth is a fashionable word in politics and economics right now, but it’s never been central to Ariel’s way of doing business. Indeed, their lack of growth in the last ten years is something they’re happy to admit to. Ariel MD Henry Siebert Saunders believes that a ‘steady as she goes’ policy based on clear thinking, attention to detail and zero tolerance of corner-cutting is the best path to a business for life. That philosophy has bred a range of products that are not only superbly built, and with obvious pride, but that can also be well rebuilt, component by component, until you get bored. Nomad upgrades aren’t infotainment software patches beamed over the airwaves in an effort to put something right. They’re actual upgrades that effectively refresh the whole car.

The Nomad 1’s powertrain comes from a company with one of the world’s best reputations for reliability. Even if something does go wrong with a Nomad the chances are it’s going to be relatively simple for an owner with a bagful of spanners and some basic knowledge to trace and then rectify. You could easily see that process as an extension of the ownership proposition. It’s the sort of immersivity that was the norm in motoring a hundred years ago but that you will struggle to find in much else nowadays other than maybe a Caterham. 

In the reader thread we referred to earlier in the Engine & Gearbox section, Olly (the PHer responsible for it) praised Ariel for the best customer service from any business he had ever dealt with. He also found the Ariel owner community to be great. The Ariel.Club Forum is open to all. It doesn’t ask you to prove ownership before allowing you access in the way that some other marque forums do. That kind of openness and the factory’s willingness to help is worth a lot. We’re going to repeat the link to Ol’s thread here because it’s brilliant, containing some fantastic pics and video footage and useful tips for other owners.

Irrespective of its engine a Nomad has the potential to make even the most mundane trip stupidly exciting. In R guise it redefined the term hypercar, establishing a new and different relationship between ‘hyper’ and ‘car’ that would be entirely unfamiliar to drivers of anything else on – or off – the road. The bespoke nature of each Nomad build means that it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever bump into two that are the same. That’s also rather nice. 

What are the downsides of Nomad ownership? On the public highway you’ll get plenty of smiles and thumbs ups but when you’ve parked up and left it for a moment to gather your breath and imbibe a restorative beverage don’t be surprised to come back and find kids of all ages, including adults, crawling all over it. Take one for a hard razz in the real countryside and you will get looks from some other countryside users that will be dirtier than your face. Not razzing it is technically possible and desirable in such circumstances but it requires immense willpower.

Then there’s the cost of becoming a Nomad owner. You might think that £45k – if you’re lucky and can find one for that – is a lot of money to pay for such a small amount of car, but actually it doesn’t look so bad when you take into account all the add-ons that a used Nomad is almost bound to have and the fact that values for used Nomads are so doggedly firm you’re never going to lose any money. 

That could change as Ariel’s future becomes a little less certain, the expensive stampede towards electrification potentially leaving small-scale ‘boutique’ outfits like them twisting in the wind. Having said that, in the offing at some point is Ariel’s extraordinary 1,180hp Hipercar with four electric motors, jet turbine range-extending battery charger and potential 0-60mph and 0-100mph times of under two and four seconds respectively, but that’s going to be a million-pound car – money, not weight. Right now though the petrol vehicles have rarity and demand on their side. Only 500 or so modern Ariels of all varieties were showing as licensed or registered off-road in the UK in the last quarter of 2023. The buying parc is not large.

In addition to that, Ariels in general and Nomads in particular are always going to be second or even third cars, so sellers aren’t going to be desperate for quick sales. They’ll be happy to start off high and see how things go over time. As an example, the £58k Supercharged from 2016 that we mentioned at the beginning of the piece has been on sale since January of this year when it was priced at £59,950. The price was dropped to £58,950 in June and to £57,950 in late July. The arrival of the Nomad 2 might chip some value off the 1s, but all we’re saying is don’t expect any crazy bargains to be popping up anytime soon.