What a car this was! A 1959 Reliant Regal Mk III, perhaps the single nastiest piece of machinery ever made. This thing owed its existence to the difficulty of gaining a driver’s license in England and to a quirk in the law that defined a contraption called a “motor tricycle” that was taxed at a lower rate and could be driven with a motorcycle license. To qualify for this dubious distinction it had to weigh less than 896 pounds and, to get below this weight limit, much that you would expect to be included (spare wheel) was an option or (heater) not available.
Well..., I had earned my motorcycle license and, despite the fact that I had never driven a car, was legally permitted to drive a motor tricycle.
It was already well understood that you could build a pretty good three-wheeled car, if you put the single wheel at the back, when the Reliant Motor Company decided to put the single wheel at the front. They put it where the engine would conventionally be located, and pushed the engine back so that it sat between the front seat occupants and drove rear wheels that were attached to a suspension that would be familiar to farmers the world over. The engine was a long-obsolete pre-war Austin Seven 748cc side valve design that showed a great appetite for head gaskets (at least mine did). With an output of 14HP it was grossly over-powered for the capabilities of the car, and may have been the last side-valve power ever offered for sale in a car anywhere in the world. It had four seats, but with four aboard it was extremely sluggish. This wasn't necessarily bad because you didn’t want to go too fast. It was advertised as having a top speed of 50mph, but one the one occasion that I got it up to 45mph it scared me so much that I never drove it above 40mph again. The body was fiberglass (it was the first production fiberglass body in England) with a thin plywood floor and the chassis was an exceptionally simple box structure.
Because I had never driven a car I had nothing to compare it with, so I just assumed that all cars were difficult to drive. It was delivered to the house by the seller, and driven forward up the driveway, so job number one was to find out how to make the thing go backwards. This took a while because it hadn’t occurred to me that you might have to pull the gear lever upward to select reverse. (I was lucky to have a reverse gear. The original definition of motor tricycle had required that a reverse gear not be fitted.)
The first evening of learning how to drive a car was, um... “interesting”. It would be several months before I discovered that it wasn’t normal for the engine to lift slightly when the clutch was depressed (engine mounts were shot), making the clutch even less progressive than at its inadequate best. It was cold (no heater) and dark (lights even worse than the Lambretta I had just graduated from). It was also running badly (head gasket was blown -- a frequent occurrence) but all of this was lost in the euphoria of one thing: I was driving A CAR. So what that the windows slid horizontally so you could only half-open them? It had windows! So what that the inside door handle was a piece of bent metal? It had doors!
By the next day I was beginning to get the hang of steering with a wheel (luckily, I'd had plenty of practice with this on boats) and was getting quite confident by the time I decided to bring it back up the driveway and found experimentally that the gatepost was stronger than the passenger door handle and the fuel filler. Luckily, it had no side mirrors even before the experiment.
The best that can be said of this combination of bad vehicle and inadequate driving skills is that I never actually turned it over (this wasn't by any means uncommon with Reliants), but when I passed my test and had a real driver’s license it wasn’t long before the Reliant was history.