The TR7, that's one awful looking car. But although they look ridiculous now, when they first came out, I wanted one so badly.
"The shape of things to come" quickly became the shape that came and went, in a great cloud of "good riddance." The doorstop-shaped TR7, and its rare V8-powered sibling TR8, were the last Triumphs sold in America and among the last the company made before it folded its tents in 1984. The trouble was not necessarily the engineering, or even the peculiar design, which looked fit to split firewood. It was that the cars were so horribly made. The thing had more short-circuits than a mixing board with a bong spilled on it. The carburetors had to be constantly romanced to stay in balance. Timing chains snapped. Oil and water pumps refused to pump, only suck. The sunroof leaked and the concealable headlights refused to open their peepers. One owner reports that the rear axle fell out. How does that happen? It was as if British Leyland's workers were trying to sabotage the country's balance of trade. Oh yeah.
Several friends owned TR7's, but I couldn't afford one, and ended up with a Fiat 127, as my first car, which definitely should have been on Time's list.
Is the Triumph Stag on the list? That it was made, like the TR7, by British Leyland would be reason enough.
It was meant to be a sports car to rival the Mercedes. That was the first bad idea ! Mercedes had a tried and tested design that worked.It had a 3 litre engine designed for the job. Triumph tried to get an old American V-8 engine under licence but failed, so they took two existing 1.5 litre engines and welded them together to make a 3 litre.Then they made the lower half of the engine of a different alloy from the top with the result that the two expanded at different rates, warping the head permanently and releasing coolant even when the head didn't warp, with consequent overheating as a constant bonus.
The Mercedes had a retractable top. The Stag's hard top required two men to remove it and there was nowhere in or on the car to stow it, so it had to be kept in the garage when not in use.
The manufacturing was up to British Leyland standards.If the electrics had been any worse they wouldn't have worked at all: ignition and timing problems were frequent.One Stag I had showed that the brake fluid was down.Not finding any leak or loss, I drove on. After a few miles I could hear the tappets rattling: the 'brake fluid gauge' had been wired by the factory to the oil gauge and vice versa, and the car was nearly out of oil.The oil was being blown out of the engine as I drove, so the onset of low oil was dramatic.
Another had a puncture. I couldn't change the wheel because the wheel-brace in the car's toolkit didn't fit the nuts on the car's wheels.The makers had changed the design of the wheels but forgotten to change the wheelbrace.
Guess what? The car wasn't a great success. The Mercedes model it was meant to rival is still fundamentally the same as it was then. Some people solved the engine problem. They got the American V-8 engine privately and had it fitted to replace the Triumph one !In fact, Triumph themselves finaly got a licence for it but fitted it only to one of their Rover models
Originally posted by FredPuli: Is the Triumph Stag on the list? That it was made, like the TR7, by British Leyland would be reason enough.
It certainly is, Fred. As they say, You could put all the names of all the British Leyland cars of the late '60s in a hat and you'd be guaranteed to pull out a despicable, rotten-to-the-core mockery of a car. So consider the Triumph Stag merely representative.
The Fiat 125 must rank High Electrics Bad Dodywork Didnt last long in countries other than Sunny Italy
Yet it spawned several badged cars built in damper climate countries which had an average lifetime of maybe 5 years tops! To name but 3 the Lada,Polski-Fiat,Seat.
And fron the same era the Early Lancia Beta which almost bankrupted the Lancia Empire! It made a Fiat 125 look perfect
quote:
The Beta was very well received by the motoring press and public when launched. The various models were praised for their lively performance as well as their good handling and roadholding. They were widely regarded as a "driver's car" with plenty of character. The Beta was competitively priced in export markets due to a weak Italian currency at that time, and managed to become the highest ever selling Lancia model up to that point.
Unfortunately a combination of poor quality steel (allegedly Russian steel supplied to Fiat in return for building the Lada factory, a claim that has never been proven, but is still widely circulated; it is far more likely that the problems with the metal itself had more to do with the prolonged strikes that plagued Italy at that time than with the metal's origin), poor rust prevention techniques (typical of almost all automobile manufacturers in the 1970s), and inadequate water drainage channels led to the Beta gaining a reputation for being rust-prone, particularly the 1st Series vehicles (built from 1972–75). The corrosion problems could be structural; for instance where the subframe carrying the engine and gearbox was bolted to the underside of the car. The box section to which the rear of the subframe was mounted could corrode badly causing the subframe to become loose. Although tales of subframes dropping out of vehicles were simply not true, a vehicle with a loose subframe would fail a technical inspection. In actuality, the problem affected almost exclusively 1st Series saloon models and not the Coupé, HPE, Spider or Montecarlo versions.
In the UK (Lancia's largest export market at the time) the company listened to the complaints from its dealers and customers and commenced a campaign to buy back vehicles affected by the subframe problem. Some of these vehicles were 6 years old or older and belonged to 2nd or 3rd owners. Customers were invited to present their cars to a Lancia dealer for an inspection. If their vehicle was affected by the subframe problem, the customer was offered a part exchange deal to buy another Lancia or Fiat car. The cars that failed the inspection were scrapped.
Sadly for Lancia, on 9 April 1980 the Daily Mirror and certain TV programmes such as That's Life! got wind of what Lancia was already doing to help its customers and embarked on a campaign to exaggerate the issue and humiliate the manufacturer. There were false claims that the problem persisted in later cars by showing photographs of scrapped 1st Series saloons, referring to them as being newer than five and six years old. Other contemporary manufacturers (British, French, Japanese and German) whose cars also suffered from corrosion were not treated as harshly. This was possibly because Lancia was seen as a luxury car brand at that time and consequently expectations were high.
Ironically, Lancia had already introduced one year previously a 6-year anti-corrosion warranty - an automotive first in the UK. Whilst later Betas (2nd Series cars) had reinforced subframe mounting points and post-1979 cars were better protected from the elements, these issues damaged the whole marque's sales success on most export markets. However, thanks to its strong driver appeal, the Beta still enjoys a dedicated following today. Surviving examples make an interesting classic car choice for the enthusiast
PS dg If the TR7 was bad how abouts Fiats lookalike version? The X1/9 Good for the Warranty then it disintegrated around you!
Posts: 13461 | Location: 6 miles west of Wigan UK | Registered: 06-05-02
"Rear-engine cars are fun to drive and even more fun to crash. While rear-engine packaging offers enormous advantages, putting the vehicle's heaviest component behind the rear axle gives cars a distinct tendency to spin out, sort of like an arrow weighted at the end. During World War II, Nazi officers in occupied Czechoslovakia were banned from driving the speedy rear-engined Tatras because so many had been killed behind the wheel. Chevrolet execs knew the Corvair — a lithe and lovely car with an air-cooled, flat-six in the back, a la the VW Beetle — was a handful, but they declined to spend the few dollars per car to make the swing-axle rear suspension more manageable. Ohhh, they came to regret that. Ralph Nader put the smackdown on GM in his book Unsafe at Any Speed, also noting that the Corvair's single-piece steering column could impale the driver in a front collision. Ouch! Meanwhile, the Corvair had other problems. It leaked oil like a derelict tanker. Its heating system tended to pump noxious fumes into the cabin. It was offered for a while with a gasoline-burner heater located in the front "trunk," a common but dangerously dumb accessory at the time. Even so, my family had a Corvair, white with red interior, and we loved it."
That being said, Corvairs got a bad rap. I did drive a '64 Corvair for two years. Ralph had it wrong I think, it was reliable, good on fuel and sporty. I loved it! I traded it in, in 1974 for a '72 Datsun because of peer pressure. The Datsun was a piece of junk. I totalled it, but that's another story for another day.
I still regret that as I only got $200.00 as a trade in and it wasn't all that long before it became a collector's item worth some serious ka-ching.
Posts: 1214 | Location: Edmonton, Alberta Canada | Registered: 06-06-02
Did the Renault Dauphine ever make it to where you were? It was made up until the mid-sixties, in surprising numbers.
It was a menace.Buyers got used to its tail trying to overtake its nose on bends, but then buyers normally drive their new car cautiously and adjust gradually.Hirers are another matter. Our family business, encouraged by enormously favourable rates from Renault, bought masses of these for car-hire.We lost dozens. The hirers innocently assumed that what they'd got was like a normal car and drive off accordingly, with normal speeds.The consequences of this were soon reported, often from the scene where it had gone sideways into a hedge
The Hillman Imp,on the other hand, like the VW, had been designed so the rear weight wasn't a big factor.It had a light alloy engine and such weight as there was wasn't hung out to ill-effect.It was a great success, once people had got used to putting their bags at the front
Some people solved the engine problem. They got the American V-8 engine privately and had it fitted to replace the Triumph one !In fact, Triumph themselves finaly got a licence for it but fitted it only to one of their Rover models
