When quality control meant fingers crossed
When it comes to classics, quirks and oddities are pretty much par for the course.
Some cars, though, take it to another level. From combusting bodyshells to brakes so inaccessible that mechanics couldn't bear to fix them, an honoured few were riddled with such infamous faults that the mere mention of their names gives PR departments shivers.
For some, those flaws made great cars into sales lemons – while others were sufficiently good, quirky or cheeky enough to be forgiven, even as the brakes failed and the suspension broke.
Either way, here are 21 famously flawed classics – from accident-prone icons to total rotters.
1. Morris Minor
Brilliantly packaged, engaging to drive and enduringly fun, the Morris Minor had one major weakness: if you didn’t regularly grease the front suspension stub-axle spindles, called trunnions, they sheared and the front wheels fell off.
Some owners neglected this lubricating ritual, resulting in mangled Moggie Minor misery.
2. Austin Mini
As with the Minor, the Mini was created by contrarian engineering genius Sir Alec Issigonis.
Taking an A-series engine, turning it sideways and stuffing its gearbox in the sump to drive the front wheels made for amazing space efficiency, but it also left the distributor, cap and leads to drown behind the front grille when it rained, making Minis spark-free and altogether static.
3. Hillman Imp
This Mini riposte, with its light-alloy rear engine, fine handling and spacious interior, should have been a world-beater.
Unfortunately, thanks to slapdash build quality, head gaskets that regularly blew, pneumatic throttles that leaked and van versions that caught fire when leaves blocked their air intakes, the Imp became the perennial dog with a bad name.
4. Vauxhall PA Cresta
With its jukebox dash, tailfins and wraparound glass, the Cresta looked wonderfully vulgar and handled like a pudding – but was a comfortable touring car beloved by salesmen.
Or it was until it went terminally, catastrophically rusty, apparently mere hours after leaving the factory. Few PAs survive because the car, like so many early-'60s Vauxhalls, was a total rot-box.
5. Lancia Beta
In the '70s, Lancia outsold BMW in Britain. With their lively twin-cam Fiat engines and engaging road manners, its Beta saloons and coupés had many friends.
Unfortunately, they were apparently also made of steel sourced partly from Russia, which turned to dust in just a few short years. Betas with advanced rot virtually snapped in half and Lancia’s UK reputation went with them.
6. Citroën GS
In an era when Ford Escorts had cart-sprung rear suspensions, Citroën’s slippery-looking 1970s GS saloon had a whizzy, air-cooled flat-four engine and self-levelling suspension, and there were even versions with rotating-drum instruments and clutch-pedal-free 'manumatic' transmissions.
It offered Gallic avant-garde in a family car, then, but that lovely engine would chew through its cams in 60,000 miles unless maintained and lubricated with complete exactitude.
7. Citroën 2CV/Dyane
With their unburstable air-cooled engines and utter simplicity, these French cars could mostly be fixed with a lump hammer and a sense of adventure – unless, that is, the front drum brakes needed attention.
The drums sat inside the chassis legs and, officially, you had to remove the front panels and the driveshafts to get to the brakes – though some owners bounced the cars up and down on their long-travel suspensions and pulled the drums over the chassis rails as their cars’ noses hit the tarmac.
Citroën eventually cured the problem by fitting disc brakes.
8. Jowett Javelin
This fine-handling, six seater, 1.5-litre flat-four-engined, Monte-Carlo Rally-winning technical tour de force should have been a massive seller, except that Jowett made its gearboxes so badly that they’d engage two gears at once, with terminal results.
Jowett was promptly buried under a pile of busted transmissions and duly went bust itself.
9. Triumph Herald
Proving that necessity is the mother of invention, when Triumph couldn’t afford unitary construction it bolted the Herald’s simple, pretty body to a basic chassis frame.
Easy to drive, mechanically reliable and charming, the Herald was good news until its chassis went rotten and the rear swing-axle suspension outriggers punched their way through the frilly box-sections, changing the angle of the back wheels and making the handling distinctly leery.
10. Triumph Stag
Britain’s slinky four-seater answer to the Mercedes SL had a burbling, lightweight in-house designed V8 and a clever targa-style roof. It should have been a big hit in America, but it was under-developed, ineptly screwed together and had severe cylinder-head issues.
Sales duly tanked and owners either fitted Rover V8s or gradually sorted the Triumph units so that good survivors are now attractive things.
11. Triumph TR5 and 6
The ultimate everyman sports car, Triumph's TR5 – with its separate chassis and robust straight-six engine – isn’t an obvious candidate for this list. Most TR5s and even a few early TR6s, though, had flaky Lucas mechanical fuel injection.
This stopped working properly when the petrol tank was about a quarter full, thanks to aerated fuel being returned to the tank and sucked back to the engine, where its anaemic combustion qualities caused trouble. Many owners had to switch to old-school carburettors.
12. Triumph Dolomite Sprint
In 1973, thrusting executives got their flares in a flap over the Triumph Dolomite Sprint. It featured a clever 2-litre, single-cam, 16-valve cylinder head that won a Design Council award and made the formerly staid Triumph as quick as a BMW 2002tii, which cost a grand more.
Sadly, the Sprint had a habit of blowing head gaskets, not helped by rapidly furred water channels caused by dealers failing to keep up the official coolant change cycles. One Sprint press car went bang when taking Observer motoring writer Sue Baker home from the Geneva Motor Show. Dolomite Sprint sales eventually went the same way.
13. Jaguar XJ-S
When the Jaguar XJ-S appeared in 1975, it was a great car disguised as a bad one. In original V12 form it was a superlative tourer with the build quality of a Lada. Getting to the V12’s rearmost spark-plugs took hours of dismantling, while elsewhere suspensions sagged, bootlids and buttresses went rusty and interiors grew damp from blocked water channels.
Sales collapsed and the car was nearly killed in 1980, but the arrival of six-cylinder engines, build-quality improvements and clever marketing helped it thrive for another 16 years.
14. Mercedes W210 E-Class
Mercedes trashed its reputation for impregnable build and reliability with this car. Taking over from the hewn-from-granite W124 E-Class in 1995, the W210’s body rotted like a swamp, alongside a raft of heater, diesel injector, electronic ignition and dash-readout maladies.
Its 2002-launched W211 replacement had issues, too – to the extent that German taxi drivers actually picketed Merc’s Stuttgart HQ to complain about them.
15. Ford Cortina MkII
Handsome, decently made and hugely popular, with an imaged burnished by Lotus-engined versions, the MkII Cortina was a massive success and probably a better car than the Coke-bottle-styled MkIII – so what’s it doing here?
Well, in the late-1960s, Ford offered it with ‘self-cleaning’ paint. This turned out to be closer to self-detaching instead, with the result that by the mid-'70s, many MkIIs were covered in leprous scabs.
16. Ford Escort MkI and II
When Ford wasn’t topping the '70s charts with the Cortina, it was doing so with the simple, durable, rally-winning Escort.
In an era of sickly Allegros and Marinas, Escorts were the acme of reliability – until the front suspension struts punched their way through rusty suspension tower ‘flitch plates’. A generation of family Fords had their lives prolonged with replacement plates secured with Frankenstein-style welds.
17. Reliant Robin
Sensible people might see the lack of two front wheels as a major design flaw, but the Robin had another issue: its lightweight glassfibre body was entirely flammable.
What's more, engine accessibility was useless and servicing often skimped, leading to leaky fuel pipes, arcing spark-plug leads and external combustion, which resulted in hundreds of Robins being burnt to the ground. Worse still, the lovely Reliant Scimitar GTE estate had similar issues.
18. Volkswagen Type 2 Microbus
OK, this one's actually a van, but generations of hippies and families alike have loved the bus and camper versions. With driver and passenger sitting over the front axle, weight distribution and handling was better than the Beetle, and this was by far the nicest rear-engined VW to drive.
However, leaves could be sucked into the side-window-height engine air intakes and, if these weren’t removed, could result in burnt-out engine bay disaster. Not such good vibes after all.
19. Bristol 405
With its handmade alloy body and lovely, free-revving, BMW-designed straight-six engine, Bristol’s only four-door model was a bespoke touring car with genuinely sporting road manners – but it did have a couple of issues.
The first was the use of timber in the windscreen framing, which eventually caused expensive, unseen pillar rot. The other was a freewheel device in first gear to allow smooth trickling in traffic. During hard acceleration this could explode, leading some owners to replace it with fixed gears.
20. Mazda RX-7
A gamechanging car, the RX-7 arrived in the late-1970s with a pretty two-seater body and a screaming Wankel rotary engine capable of devilish rev rates. While it still guzzled petrol, Mazda reckoned it had the engine’s rotor-tip-frazzling problems sorted.
A lot of people bought RX7s to find this was only partially true: even the early–2000s RX-8 with its curvaceous, two-and-a-half-door body demonstrated similar frailties in the end, although emissions issues actually finished it off.
21. Rover P6
Conceived as a kind of Anglicised Citroën DS, the Rover P6 virtually invented the modern executive saloon market. The P6 had a clever base-unit substructure that was strong and good in a crash, together with features such as inboard rear disc brakes.
Except that the base unit rotted in places that were hard to see. Cars could be immaculate outside and wormwood within, while the rear discs were hell to work on because they were only accessible under the car.
Some deaf or cash-strapped owners ground those discs to death when brake pads wore out, while others chopped inspection hatches in the floorpan to reach them.
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