Why bother to record this sorry tale of vehicles so “interesting”, so full of character, that it was a constant battle to get them to move?
Why, for example, would a sane, healthy, person buy two cars that boasted a grand total of six wheels between them?
Well, the real answer to that is “why not?” (or perhaps “it seemed like a good idea at the time”). But it’s a (thankfully) bygone time in transportation now, so it could just about qualify as history. Some of these are considered collectible vehicles these days, which just goes to show that there’s nothing as strange as folks who collect things.
Here are four vehicles that still turn my head but, much as I would have liked, I never owned
The Land Rover has been around for a long time, and I've wanted one since I was three years old. I don't mean a shiny SUV-type Land Rover (I've had plenty of Slow Ugly Vehicles), I mean the mud-green diesel Series I 80 inch soft-top Land Rover that the three-year-old me spent two days in traveling from the South of England to Edinburgh in the middle seat of when I was that age. I know it was an excellent vehicle because the driver gave me hard candy and I saw a robin perched on a railway level crossing gate in Coldstream -- you can't argue with facts like that! Actually, the one that I got as far as writing a check for was a 109 inch Station Wagon. And there was the Dormobile camper conversion on the same vehicle type that I really liked. But it wasn't to be, and I doubt if I'll ever own one now.
A Triumph 650cc motor cycle. Once again, this is one that I came close to buying several times, but I always listened to the voice of sanity and ended up with a sensible series of Lambrettas and small Hondas. There was the Panther 200, of course, but the closest I ever got to actually riding that horrible thing was spending a weekend pushing it up & down the road in a futile attempt to coax it into starting.