Sir Lawrence Hartnett had been very involved in the development of the first mass-produced Holden which was launched in the late 1940s.

At some point in the 1950s he left the company (then known as General Motors' Holden) and in the mid 1950s issued media reports (covered at least in an issue of the Readers' Digest (Australian edition) about his plan to launch a new automobile company producing a car to be called the Lloyd Hartnett - this was to be a clone of the Lloyd 600 with a Datsun 6 cylinder engine. It did not reach commercial production.