Dad's first car
- Thread starter toad a caravan
- Start date
- Nov 11, 2009
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Mine was purchased using my redundancy payment from GEC, even fitted the new fangled seat belt things and windscreen washers to replace a Squeezy bottle. Note the overnight parking light too…..cool.
The engine wasn't merely similar to the Austin 7 - Reliant bought out the tooling from Austin when they ended production of the 7 engine and put this engine back into production - similarly the Reliant side-valve engine was replaced by an all-alloy 803cc OHV engine reverse-engineered by Reliant from the Standard 8 engine although Standard-Triumph kept their engine in production gradually enlarging it to 1500, as used in the Spitfire and Midget - this engine also became the basis for the Triumph 6-cylinder engines and in turn the Rover 6-cylinder engines used in the SD1
They produced the crankshaft differently on the 7 engine and increased its H.P,,the 750 cc ally engine was the last ohv to be produced in Europe
The Robin ended production in 2002 but the Rolls-Royce / Bentley V8 was OHV and lasted until 2020, built in Shropshire and final asembly in Crewe.
In production for 61 years - but with constant development the last versions produced 2.5x the power of the first and using 40% less fuel
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