Motoring mistakes that were best chucked in the bin
Let’s be blunt: there are some cars that should never have been made – vehicles that were so ill-advised that they ought to have been sent to the firing squad before they ever left the drawing board.
Sometimes the intentions were good, let down only by the implementation – most notably when questionable styling or dubious reliability came into the equation. Many, though, were quite simply as daft in concept as they were badly executed.
Most of these machines today seem full of character, agreeable to drive and enjoyable to own – but the fogs of nostalgia shouldn’t obscure the fact that the business case for making them in the first place was, to put it kindly, a little flawed.
And so, with that, it’s time to brave the brickbats: here are 10 driving duds that should never have been made.
Austin A90 Atlantic
Make an American-style car and it’ll appeal to Americans, right? Not really – especially not if it’s built by the Brits, powered by a weedy (by US standards) four-cylinder engine and costs as much as a decent Chevy.
What Austin boss Leonard Lord failed to understand with his firm’s A90 Atlantic was that Britishness – from the free-spirit eccentricity of the MG to the wood-and-leather luxury of the Jaguar – was what really pulled in punters from across the pond, not thinly veiled efforts to make something ‘American’.
The Atlantic would probably have sold well to delusional British buyers with more money than taste, but the export-only regime meant this gargoyle was instead shipped across the seas to people who laughed at the sight of the three-headlamp, vinyl-roofed horror from the land of warm beer.
Triumph TR7
Surely the most apt symbol of British Leyland’s incompetence, the TR7 was intended to be the firm’s one-size-fits-all sports car. Was it? Absolutely not: outsold by the dated MGB in the States, the Triumph was ugly, shoddily assembled and shipped as a hard-top when people wanted convertibles.
And that’s without mentioning the terrible four-speed gearbox it carried at launch, which couldn’t cope with the engine’s power – provided the motor hadn’t already blown a gasket, that was.
By the time the V8 and drop-top variants arrived, it was too late: BL had squandered its major export market with this ill-considered turkey – and the TR7 almost certainly never made a profit, despite the 115,000 sold.
Renault Colorale
Before the war, Frenchmen who thought a Citroën Traction Avant too clever by half – and a Peugeot 402 too flashy – kept Renault nicely in business by buying rugged Primaquatres and Vivaquatres.
Once the 4CV was in production, the recently nationalised Régie Renault pitched for this market with a new workhorse aimed at ‘coloniale and rurale’ buyers – hence Colorale.
Launched in 1950, it was thirsty, slow and ugly (its dreary estate, van and pick-up bodies built by Chausson), nobody wanted the thing and even changing the engine didn’t help.
Renault made a howling loss and pulled the plug in 1956, leaving Colorales to end their days in country garages, chopped into breakdown trucks.
Talbot Tagora
Simmering at the former Simca when Chrysler Europe was taken over by Peugeot in 1978, this big saloon was completely reworked to take Peugeot 505 mechanicals, a promising combination with plenty of potential. Except it was to serve as the flagship for the new Talbot – a marque that nobody believed in.
Europe didn’t seem to want another sub-BMW executive saloon and the sharp styling was undermined by a dull, average interior that could have been lifted from, well, any sub-BMW executive saloon.
Just 20,000 or so were made between 1981 and 1983 – a hopeless waste of time that would’ve been better spent making a decent Simca 100 replacement, rather than cut-and-shutting a 104 to make the similarly disappointing Samba.
AMC Pacer
AMC’s styling chief Dick Teague came up with this bold three-door hatch, billed as ‘the first wide small car’.
Bravely glassy, the Pacer was hailed as a breath of fresh air but, beneath the goldfish-bowl styling, the compact wagon had feet of clay: instead of the intended Wankel engine it had to make do with AMC’s under-powered straight-six.
Four years after its ’75 launch, annual sales were down to 10,000 and in 1980 the Pacer was canned. AMC had played its last card. Alas, it hadn’t been the ace it so badly needed.
Daimler SP250
Daimler took a big old gamble when it decided to take on MG, Austin-Healey and Triumph in the US, but copying the TR chassis and popping in a tasty little V8 engine didn’t seem such a bad idea.
Until, that is, Daimler blew it with the SP250’s grotesque plastic body: the shell flexed and the doors flew open, nobody liked the looks and the roadholding was average at best. The Dart was a disaster; cars were shipped back from the US and the firm was snapped up by Jaguar.
Daimler had predicted an annual build of 3000 units. In reality? Just 2645 were built before it was snuffed out in ’64.
Austin 3 Litre
A label on the prototype’s bumper read ‘Ron’s White Elephant’ – unfair on Ron Nicholls, the engineer saddled with developing this late-’60s disappointment, given that his team made the doomed 3 Litre as reasonable as possible.
Austin’s effort at an executive saloon, it was ordered by BMC boss George Harriman based on the knowledge that police loved the Austin Westminster and Wolseley 6/110 – despite the fact that the bottom had fallen out of the market with the arrival of the hip Rover P6 and Triumph 2000.
Following factory delays, sales proved stagnant and the standard model was pulled in ’69; production stumbled on for another two years until the line was completely culled in 1971.
Lea-Francis Lynx
This gormless would-be sportster was based on an idea drawn out on the back of a paper bag by a vainglorious building contractor named Kenneth Benfield, a man who saw himself as a motor manufacturer.
It was then rushed through production to be displayed at the 1960 Motor Show at Earl’s Court, finished in lilac paint with gold trimmings. Gaudy doesn’t quite cover it.
Priced higher than a Jaguar XK150, powered by a Ford Zephyr engine and looking, well, unspeakable, just three were made. Talk of an Italian rebodying? A load of hot air; Trevor Fiore artwork was as far as it got.
BMW 501 & 502 ‘Baroque Angels’
The last thing BMW needed as it crawled from the wreckage of the Third Reich was a big 2-litre tin-top – let alone one with ill-resolved ‘Baroque’ styling, too much weight and a huge price tag, especially as Mercedes was wheeling out its cheaper 220.
Fitting a V8 to create the 502 was an answer to a question no-one had asked, while building the 503/507 on the same basis wasn’t much smarter.
Sales were slow once production got up and running and, after a brief revival with the Isetta, BMW was as good as dead by 1959. It was only thanks to the 700, the Quandts and the 1500 that the marque survived.
Citroën GS Birotor
They were warned: Paul Magès, father of Citroën’s self-levelling hydropneumatic suspension, studied the Wankel engine and reported that the sums would never add up. So what did the French firm do? Joined up with NSU and invested heavily in a new factory to churn out tens of thousands of rotary engines.
As if to cement this ill-advised decision, in 1973 Citroën fitted the GS with a twin-rotor Wankel number that guzzled petrol, just in time for the mid-’70s fuel crisis. It cost 70% more than the standard car, was less than reliable and proved dangerously prone to setting the car on fire if it was parked on grass with a hot exhaust.
A total disaster, the model tanked with fewer than 850 units built. It was quickly pulled, but the whole Birotor palaver – and its effect on Citroën’s finances – saw the marque fall into the hands of Peugeot in 1974.
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