Motoring Misfits: Cheetah Cars

Listing the world's worst cars has always been a fun and often controversial topic, but I'm growing tired of the same old subjects being repeated ad infinitum and instead I nominate some of my own choices that are so bad their very existence is almost unknown. I'm not going to fall into the usual clichés like the Edsel, Austin Allegro and Alfa Romeo Arna that appear on everyone else's lists, as those cars all had some merit and can be defended by enthusiastic supporters.

To find something truly awful, one has to look beyond the mass-producers to the weird and wonderful world of cottage industry kit car manufacturers. Many of these are extremely obscure, but thanks to a book I have recently purchased, the fascinating Filby Files Vol. 2 - Classic Kit Cars by Chris Rees and Peter Filby, a whole new world of bizarre and rubbish contraptions has been revealed to me and some of them make the Allegro look like a model of perfection.

Motoring Misfits: Nissan Cherry Europe

It's odd how cars made in particular countries seem to share certain characteristics. Italian cars for instance are known for sportiness and good handling at the expense of reliability, whereas those from Japan are exactly the opposite, very well built but usually very dull. Combining the best bits from these two nations should therefore have created the perfect blend of Italian flair with Japanese quality, but what resulted was instead the worst of both worlds. The Alfa Romeo Arna is a motoring misfit in its own right, but it has a lesser-known twin that is even more so, a Nissan built by Alfa Romeo and rebadged back into a Nissan. How did such a bizarre state of affairs come into being?

A Nissan that's really an Alfa that's really a Nissan 

Unsung heroes: CVE Omni

Travel on any modern low-floor bus and you'll soon notice a fundamental design problem. With the engine mounted at the rear, a flat floor is impossible and while the front half may be nice and low there's always an awkward arrangement of steps or ramps up to the back seats. Wouldn't it make far more sense to put the engine at the front and drive the front wheels so it's completely out of the way of the passenger compartment? Such a vehicle did exist almost thirty years ago and had the potential to revolutionise the minibus industry but sadly turned out to be a bit of a flop that has disappeared into obscurity, so I've nominated it as my final unsung hero of the year.

H389 KPY is the sole surviving Omni in PSV service
(By Pimlico Badger - EMPHAST H389KPY, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25343829)

Unsung heroes: Eagle Premier

This month the unsung heroes series returns to the USA with an especially bizarre choice that non-American readers will probably never have heard of and even Americans are likely to have forgotten. The Eagle Premier is a product of the 1980s, a dark time in US automotive history that created some frankly terrible cars, and if remembered at all is often cited as a perfect example of these with its unreliability and dull-as-ditchwater styling - a site called TheStreet.com even declared it the worst car of all time. I feel that is completely unfair: while the Premier may seem pretty boring it was actually very competent and quite innovative by American standards and I can think of cars that are far, far worse. Read on for the fascinating story behind this Franco-American crossbreed and how it should have shaken up the US motor industry. 

The perfect combination of American and European? It looks a bit like an Audi if you squint
(Image: allpar.com)

The Quest continues

More about Quest 80

I haven't had much time for blogging lately as the show season is now in full swing. Last Sunday I was back at Gaydon for the truck show, but I'm not going to do a full review this time as it was the same deal as the last two years. My star of the show last year was B.R. Whorton's near-unique Quest 80 tipper, and this time they went one better and had both of them in attendance. That meant what is probably the world's entire population of Quest lorries were in one place, and a chat with the gentleman looking after them for the weekend revealed some more information so I can add extra detail to my original piece about Quest 80.

Every Quest lorry in existence in one photo

Unsung heroes: Chevrolet Corvair

Unsafe at any speed?

Today's unsung hero is the first American car in the series and another controversial choice. The Chevrolet Corvair is often cited as one of the worst cars of all time and ranked alongside such other disasters as the Edsel and the AMC Pacer, but was it really that bad? Yes, its reputation was ruined (unfairly as it turned out) by a best-selling book that condemned it as an inherently dangerous car, but the Corvair was actually very revolutionary for an automotive industry that had become set in its ways and reluctant to innovate, and inadvertently created a whole new market sector that was keenly exploited by other manufacturers. I think it deserves a reappraisal and here I present the case for the defence...

Is it really fair to call this one of the world's worst cars?
(By Charles01 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27794784)

Oltcit oddball

I have previously mentioned my friend Chris's love of all things Citroen, and this weekend I was able to get up close and personal with what to me is the star of his collection, something so unusual in the UK I doubt many readers have ever heard of it, yet alone seen one in the flesh. Alongside several Visas, he also has a rare example of what the Visa could have been: the Oltcit, also known as the Citroen Axel. Those names probably mean nothing to you, but the Oltcit is significant as the last pure Citroen design devoid of any Peugeot influence. It wasn't even built in France though - read on to find out more about the peculiar story of this curious little car.

It could only be a Citroen design, but not one you'll recognise

Driven to disaster: the Andrea Moda story

A new Formula 1 season has just begun, and to be quite honest I won't be bothering to follow it as I have long since lost interest in this now very clinical and costly sport. Instead, I'm looking back 25 years to a time when there were so many drivers competing that a pre-qualifying session was necessary just to trim down the numbers in qualifying proper, and all sorts of hopeless outfits wasted their time and money getting nowhere. Against some very stiff competition, the particular team I'm looking at are widely regarded as the worst ever to grace the sport. Life may have had the worst car, but did at least manage to turn up at every meeting with it in working order, something this team had difficulty with, although unlike Life they did actually once start a race. I'm talking about Andrea Moda, an outfit so staggeringly inept they have the dubious distinction of ending up getting banned after less than a season for bringing the sport into disrepute.

Andrea Moda really didn't belong in F1

Dream cars: Panther Six

Four wheels good, six wheels better?

How many wheels should a car have? Most of you would agree that four is the right number but there have always been those people who think differently. There was never a more extreme expression of this idea than the absurd six-wheeled Panther Six, the closest thing ever made to a real-life version of Lady Penelope's FAB1 and something that wouldn't look at all out of place in a Gerry Anderson show. Normally I like subtlety and understatement in my favourite cars and don't go for showy types, but I can't help admiring the Panther Six for its sheer audacity: it is unashamedly vulgar and designed purely to attract attention, and is a magnificent monument to 1970s excess so I would find a place for one in my dream garage.

What do you do when four wheels just aren't enough? (Panther press photo via AROnline)

Road Roving

In my most recent unsung heroes piece I suggested the Matra Rancho may have been the world's first crossover. As a production car that is probably true, but I have been reminded of another project that predated the Rancho by more than two decades. It never made production but came very close and had it done so could certainly have been considered an ancestral crossover. The vehicle I'm talking about is the Road Rover, which you may not have heard of before so read on for the full story...

Unsung heroes: Matra Rancho

Walk down any street in the UK nowadays and there is one type of car you're pretty much guaranteed to see: the crossover, combining the chunky looks of an off-roader with conventional two-wheel-drive underpinnings and exemplified by the best-selling Nissan Qashqai. You may think crossovers are a 21st century phenomenon, yet there is a car that could lay claim to pioneering this market sector way back in the late seventies, long before the term 'crossover' had even been invented. I'm talking about the Talbot Matra Rancho, a vehicle derided in its day for having the looks of a 4x4 without the off-road ability but arguably just too far ahead of its time, which had it appeared thirty years later could have been a great success.

The first crossover, thirty years before its time?

Sao what?

South Africa: a country with a fascinating domestic motor industry (Austin Apache, Ford Sierra XR8 and Volkswagen CitiGolf to name just three of the interesting cars built there) but not one known for exports. Apart from the Ford P100, which doesn't really count as it was a pickup truck or 'bakkie' in the vernacular, you'd probably struggle to think of any South African car that was officially imported to the UK. In fact there has only ever been one and it has long since vanished into automotive oblivion. What was this mythical beast then? Read on to find out...

A futile Quest

Quest 80 and the U-drive

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds the failures of the motoring world so much more fascinating than the successes. So much has already been written about the most celebrated and popular vehicles that there is nothing new to add, but those that failed to make an impact are far more worthy of study and raise so many interesting questions. Why did they fail? Could they have succeeded under different circumstances? And in some cases, what the hell were they thinking?! Today's subject tends to fall in the latter category: unsurprisingly you may never have heard of Quest 80 buses and coaches as they went out of business more than thirty years ago after building just a handful of vehicles, but their claim to fame (or should that be infamy?) was a notoriously cumbersome and inefficient drivetrain that frankly defied engineering logic. Read on to find out more about this strange and forgotten manufacturer and their range of blunderbuses.

The worst F1 car ever? That's Life

Formula 1. Supposedly the jewel in the crown and the pinnacle of international motorsport, but quite honestly something that no longer interests me at all. With entry fees alone costing many millions and an extremely complicated and restrictive rule book, only the largest and wealthiest teams can afford to compete and the racing has become very clinical and boring as a result. It wasn't always like that though: in the late eighties and early nineties, the fees were much lower and the rules more favourable to smaller independent teams, resulting in entry lists so large that many races had to feature a pre-qualifying session to weed out a few of the weaker cars before the qualifying proper. All sorts of small and now forgotten outfits came and went during this period, usually trundling around at the tail end of the field and rarely even managing to start a race, yet alone finish. The strange stories behind them provide far more interest than the mundanity of today's top teams, none more so than the ill-equipped and ill-fated Life Racing Engines. The very reason for this team even existing is hard to fathom...

Putting the car before the horse

Uriah Smith and the Horsey Horseless

One of my favourite places on the internet is the Autoshite.com forum, a little corner of the web where those who appreciate old and unloved cars gather to share their mutual interest. Like all good communities it has its own collection of memes and in-jokes that outsiders wouldn't understand, one of which involves regular mentions of a mythical veteran car called a Horsey Horseless. I had assumed this was something that had been made up by a forum member some time before I joined, but it turns out the Horsey Horseless was a real car - well, sort of: it certainly existed on paper but there is no proof any were actually built.

The only known image of the Horsey Horseless. Would this mutant horse-car fool our equine friends?

Unsung heroes: the rise and fall of Proton

In the second of what I hope to be an occasional series on the unsung heroes of the motoring world (the first of which is here), I turn my attention to a car manufacturer that may never have produced anything remotely exciting or technologically advanced and is now virtually invisible in this country, but once filled an important niche among those wanting cheap reliable no-frills transport and appealed particularly to the retired generation.

The Malaysian firm of Proton has had a presence in the UK for over 25 years now but you would easily be forgiven for not realising the brand is still active here as 2014 sales totalled a pathetic eleven cars! Yes, you read that right: less than a dozen cars sold in an entire year, and all but one of those were in December after a ten-month drought with no sales at all, so cynics might suggest they were actually dealer-registered in desperation to avoid the acute embarrassment of selling only one car all year. The range may be cheap but is now distinctly on the elderly side, the newest model dating back to 2006, and although there have been promises of all-new products for several years these have yet to materialise, leaving Proton as a tiny and forgotten bit-player in the UK market. It wasn't always that way though...

Bringing the Albany out of obscurity

So you think you know about cars? Answer me this then...what is a Vauxhall Albany?


Never heard of it? I can't say I'm surprised as it seems to have been almost totally forgotten and by publishing this post I have doubled the amount of material about it available on the internet! The only other page I can find is on the excellent Vauxpedia, a first-stop resource for all things Vauxhall.

Vauxhall publicity photo of the elusive Albany. No one ever seems to have photographed one on the road!

So what was the Albany and why has it been consigned to the scrapyard of automotive history?

In short it was Vauxhall's first MPV, but also basically a Bedford Midi van with windows. Although the Midi was already well established in minibus form, these were utilitarian vehicles aimed squarely at the commercial market, and the success of the likes of the Renault Espace prompted Vauxhall to produce a far more upmarket car-like seven-seater.

The Bedford Midi. Fine as a van but did it ever stand a chance in the MPV market?

The Albany was launched at the 1990 British Motor Show and featured an impressive list of standard equipment that was certainly a cut above the basic Midi, including tinted glass, twin sunroofs, reclining seats, separate rear heating and power steering. Sadly, all of these luxuries couldn't disguise the fact it was very obviously based not only on a van, but a van that was starting to show its age against the competition. Only one brochure was ever issued for the Albany, which pictured the vehicle in various aspirational 'lifestyle' settings where it was horribly out of place but seemed to aim it primarily at business customers such as hotels and corporate shuttle services rather than private buyers.

The Albany brochure promoting its lifestyle credentials. The glider would probably be a more pleasant mode of transport.

The upshot of all this was that the Albany flopped. The range never expanded beyond a single model available in just two colours (the Bordeaux Red and Westminster Blue illustrated above) and propelled by a crude and underpowered 2-litre petrol engine. Perhaps more significantly than the vehicle's own failings though, the market for luxury van-derived MPVs we see today exemplified by the Ford Tourneo and Mercedes Viano just didn't exist 25 years ago and cars such as the Espace were aimed very much at the small niche of providing fairly basic transport for large families without portraying a prestige image, so the Albany's 'executive' credentials were somewhat misplaced. Only 300 were officially sold before it was quietly dropped just over a year after launch, and around half of those are said to have actually been registered either by dealers or by Vauxhall themselves in a desperate attempt to improve the dire sales figures. Vauxhall's next attempt at an MPV, the American-built Sintra, met with little more success but it was third time lucky with the innovative Zafira.


I actually have some recollection of seeing an Albany in real life. A large family in the village where I went to primary school had a red one - this was the early nineties so they probably bought it new. Even in my very young mind I knew it was basically a van and vastly inferior to the Mitsubishi Space Wagon my parents had at the time. Today there are apparently only two left on the road and the model has disappeared into almost total obscurity - has anyone actually seen one?

So there you have it, my own little tribute to a tiny, insignificant and forgotten part of automotive history.