Cars You Never Heard Of! Part 1

Of course I spend a lot of time reading and again a lot of that is two or three-dimensional, although my wife says it’s a single dimension.  She sees just “CARS”  I see muscle cars, sedans (that I want to turn in to muscle cars), exotic cars and even some European cars.  That’s multi-dimensional, don’t you think?  I gained a little interest in them when I was a kid and my Dad surprised my Mother with a 60’ish MGB – mainly I learned that unless you wanted to fix ’em a lot…stay a way!!!

I gained a little more familiarization with another brand when I was in college.   I had my license suspended….you can figure out why…so don’t make me say ‘too many speeding tickets”, ok?  Thanks.  So it was only about a mile or so walk to the campus from where I stayed, but if you are from one of the colder States, like northern New York, then you’d know that a morning jaunt on  a Dec. morning is ‘nippy” to say the least.  So I would catch a ride with a friend.  He drove the one of the coolest cars I had ridden.  It was a Citroen. Similar to this one:

It had the coolest suspension that would raise when you started it and lower when you turned it off.

My point being that there is another dimension to my reading – European cars.  But I am in no way any kind of expert with any of them – although when I lived in Germany, I drove a very old European Ford Escort.  That car was horrible!!!! However, it got me round, even when the upper part of the seat frame broke and the only way to drive it was by holding yourself forward using the steering wheel else the seat back, because it leaned so much, should dump you in the back seat.  Last  year I signed up for..please kneel…”HEMMINGS”… thank you….you may relax now… SPORTS & EXOTIC CAR magazine – some great articles and I enjoy Mike’s and Richard’s writings. Geezze, this is a long way around to the point that I picked up a copy of Classic & Sports Car magazine – UK produced – the other day.

In this was a series of articles that pitted 4 pair of cars against each other.  One car in each pair was an expensive classic brand/model and the other was relatively inexpensive newer brand/model.  Two things dawned on me, one was,”Hey, I’ve never heard of a Reliant Scimitar SS1 or a Panther Kallista.”   The  second thing was, “Hey, have never heard of any of these cars!”   Normally if  I have just one of these realizations – I won’t read the article… nope not interested…. but this time I did.

And now I need to know a little about these cars and I know you do to….all three of my readers!!!  So we’ll take a look at  the Panther Kallista and the  Caterham Seven and the TVR S3 and the Reliant Scimitar SS1.

First up is the Reliant Scimitar SS1.

This car (at about 3000 British Pounds  – $6000 USD) was being compared to the Lotus Elan (at 16000 British Pounds or about $32,000 USD).  Here is what it looks like:

Reliant Scimitar SS1

Not bad-looking!!!!

These cars were made from 1986 to 1990, however the Scimitar  actually arrived on the scene in 1964 with a Ford straight 6 cylinder as the power plant.  These more recent models  had a spaceframe chassis and fiberglass body, an iron block, alloy heads, SOHC 1809 cc, 8 valve 4.  It also sported a Garrett T2 Turbo with electronic multi-port fuel injection system.  This allowed it to  lay out 140 HP and 141 lb ft of torque and reach a top speed of 128 mph and it only weighted 1969 lbs.

They sported a 5 speed manual transmission, rack and pinion steering, double wishbone independent suspension and disks breaks.

Just to give you some closure, it was compared to the Lotus Elan where it scored 2 points less than the Lotus (38 to 40) in Driving, Practicality, Character, Value and Usability.

Any one out there have one of these?  Know anyone that has one?  If so drop a comment and pic.

Thanks for reading.

Tim