4 wheels and an engine: that’s what a car should be, right? Well, for 67 years, Britain’s Reliant Motor Company couldn’t even do that. They become famous for their 3 wheelers and were the butt of every joke. And yet, they wound up at one point being Britain’s 2nd largest domestically owned automaker. So just how did they do it?

Let me first explain why on earth anyone would buy ¾ of a car. In Britain, there was a loophole that treated lightweight 3 wheeled vehicles as motorcycles-and-sidecars. This meant you could drive one with just a motorcycle license. This was appealing to a great number of people with no car licenses, particularly amongst coal miners in the North of England.

Reliant started in 1935, in Tamworth, in England’s Midland region, making the 7CWT, the name referring to the weight class of 7 hundredweight, or 785 pounds. It was a sort of motorcycle-pickup truck hybrid. It was powered by a 600 CC single cylinder motorcycle engine, so it was very slow. In 1936, they brought out the 8CWT which used a twin cylinder engine that provided much more power. And in 1938, they began using the 747CC 4 cylinder engine from the Austin Seven, and Reliant bought the rights to produce the engine in-house. Then of course, there was the war and the halting of civilian automobile production.

In 1946, production restarted. Their new model was a van called the Regent, which just looked like a motorcycle that crashed into a camping trailer. The company realized it needed to build something that looked like a car if they wanted to be taken seriously.

And so, in 1953, the Regent made way for the equally royal Regal. The advertisements said it was the ideal car for “shopping and countryside touring”. At first the car was made with aluminum body parts on a wooden frame, but as the price of the metal skyrocketed, they were forced to slowly substitute fiberglass. Either way, the Regal was extremely lightweight, tipping the scales at less than 1000 pounds. 

In 1961, Reliant decided to introduce a sports car. Developed in collaboration with the Israeli company Autocars, the Sabre was powered by a 1.7 liter Ford 4 cylinder making 73 horsepower. The car also had disc brakes and rack and pinion steering. In 1962, a 2.5 liter V6 was added making 109 horsepower.

In 1963, the Regal was given a huge redesign. The wooden frame was replaced by one that was all fiberglass. And new overhead valve engines replaced the old sidevalves. There were 2 models, the 3/25 and 3/30, both referring to the horsepower figures of 25 and 30, respectively.

In 1964, Reliant introduced a 4 wheel version of the Regal called the Rebel. It got a slightly more powerful engine to carry around the extra weight. But the car was simply hopeless against the Mini, and only 2600 were sold over 10 years.

In 1964, the Sabre was replaced by the Scimitar. The engines stayed the same, relying on Ford V6s. It was a good looking car, but the 3 box coupe version sold poorly.

In 1968, they introduced a shooting brake version. This gave plenty of room for skis and was fairly popular. In 1970, the Queen gave one to her sister Anne as a Christmas present. She wound up owning 8 of them. 

In 1969, Reliant bought its only competitor, Bond. They were then ordered to create a fun car based on the Regal. The result was the 1970 Bond Bug, a wedge shaped orange curiousity with a lift-up canopy entry system. 2500 were sold before production ended in 1974.

In 1973, Reliant introduced a name which will live in infamy. A car that became a by-word for all their cars. The car was the Reliant Robin, nicknamed “Plastic Pig”.

To explain the mechanical specifications, here’s Jeremy Clarkson, starting at 1:30.

I’m being a little unfair here, in truth, the Robin was a success before it became a total joke. By this point, Reliant was Britain’s 2nd largest domestically owned automaker (the domestically owned caveat eliminates Ford of Britain, GM’s Vauxhall, and Chrysler’s Rootes Group) behind the infamous British Leyland. Reliant was the largest consumer of fiberglass in Europe. The US embassy in London had 3 of them in its fleet. And the aforementioned Princess Anne had one.

In 1975, Reliant made another 4 wheeled version of its 3 wheeler, this one called the Kitten. But again, they couldn’t give them away. Only 4000 were sold over 7 years. Without the license advantage, it was really hard to claim a Reliant was better than a Mini.

In 1982, the Robin was replaced by the more aerodynamic Rialto. It was more stable at high speeds and more fuel efficient. The problem was that Reliant was entering into its terminal decline. It was at this point that it became little more than a punchline.

In 1981, the BBC launched a sitcom called Only Fools and Horses. It was about 2 characters, Del Boy and his younger brother Rodney Trotter, who get into various get-rich-quick schemes. Their car was a yellow Reliant Regal Van which was the subject of many jokes on the show.

And another Reliant Regal was a running gag on the sitcom Mr. Bean usually involving road battles with the titular character, Mr Bean, while driving his Mini.

Reliant was now a joke and the company began to suffer financially.

In 1984, Reliant launched its last new car, the Scimitar SS1 roadster. Confusingly, it was sold alongside the original Scimitar until the latter’s demise in 1986 (although another company called Middlebridge Scimitar bought rights to production in 1987 and built them from 1988 to 1990). The SS1 lasted until 1995 over which time only 1500 were sold, lower than planned annual production. 

In 1989, the Robin name was revived, but there were few changes over 1981, with just the front end being different. 

In 1999, the Robin saw its last changes with a rounded front end using headlights from the Vauxhall Corsa. In 2000, it was announced production would end the next year. The last ever Reliant Robin was given away in a Valentine’s Competition by The Sun newspaper in 2001. It wound up being the 2nd most popular fiberglass car in history, behind only the Chevrolet Corvette. Only the Plastic Fantastic outsold the Plastic Pig.

But the Reliant would get its most infamous beating in a 2009 episode of Top Gear. In it, host Jeremy Clarkson drives a red 1994 model from Sheffield to Rotherham, a perilous 14 mile journey. He winds up rolling the car at almost every single corner and getting put right again by various celebrities. He tries to fix the problem by giving it training wheels, but still winds up driving it into a river. 

Clarkson later admitted that they sabotaged the Robin to make it more tipsy.

"A normal Reliant Robin will not roll unless a drunken rugby team is on hand. Or it's windy. But in a headlong drive to amuse and entertain, I'd asked the backroom boys to play around with the differential so that the poor little thing rolled over every time I turned the steering wheel," he wrote.

So that’s Reliant, a car company that took advantage of a loophole to become the 2nd largest British owned automaker. But it wound up being turned into a punchline.