Two classic cars that no one would find desirable (possibly other than me)
The Austin Allegro - voted worst car ever made in Britain. I learnt to drive in one of these. a 1.3 litre engine (A series engine) which was basically the same engine first put in a Morris Minor is 1956. It was, to put it politely an utter piece of junk. It handled poorly, had no power, the suspension wallowed and the build quality was dubious at best.
It's top speed (downhill with wind assistance) was 70 miles per hour and at that speed the car had a habit of jumping into neutral. My dad gave the All-Agro away 2 years ago and I'm yet to forgive him. I had visions of driving the length of Britan in it, visiting places where things had gone spectacularly wrong in the UK as an homage to failure. Learn to drive one of these spastics and you can pretty much find anything else endearing and simple to drive.
PS Yes. Ours was poo brown.
The Hilman Avenger.
This was the car (in this colour) that my father owned when I was born. Well, when I say it was in this colour it also had huge rust patches on it when it was just a few years old. The Avenger was actually a decent car for it's time and rivalled Ford's Escort. It handled well, had a modern look (including the first ever plastic grill on a European production car) and was well received in the media. However it had chronic rust issues and these surfaced just a few years later. It wasn't really very powerful either with a 1275cc version as the mainstay.
There was a 1500cc TIGER version - below
but 1500cc wasn't exactly a ball tearer even by the mid 70's standards.
But it was up against the Allegro and Marina by Leyland and the Viva by Vauxhall, so as long as it was better than utter crap, it was probably going to sell
The death of the Rootes group saw the demise of the Avenger and not before time.
Still, I'd love to get a decent body shell and put something like a 1.6 injected engine in there to see what the car could have been like had someone at Rootes had half an ounce of brains.
But it's hard to build a car using a body that is 99% rust or holes where metal used to be.
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