Richard_FM

I follow someone on Flickr from Chile, which has a similar mix of cars as Uruguay. He's been to some other Latin American countries with interesting selections of cars.

This saga has a few more twists to it!

Here's a 127 hatchback on this mini brochure from 1972.

I heard the sunroof motors can become unreliable over time, same with the electric window ones.

Still plenty of black cabs around in Stockport & Manchster.

I remember seeing an N reg VW Beetle about 30 years ago which had B&W plates, that looked like they were original to the car. The 1973 Motor road test book I have has cars with a mixture of reflective & white on black plates, though some press cars deliberately had non-reflective plates so it wouldn't have glare problems when photographed. I've seen a few examples of pre-1967 cars with reflective plates retrofitted, often repainted with brighter colours than they left the factory with. It seemed common to do this to older cars in the 1970s.

I remember reading on a Bangernomics site about someone who had one of this in New Zealand. Quite brave as they were only briefly imported down there & 126 specific spares were next to impossible to source. He mentioned the engine was like a lawnmower chugging away, & the only really good feature was the light & balanced steering.

It looks like it was done in the old fashioned way, by being cut out with a scalpel & pasted on, with the old woman stuck on to hide things. It's the sort of thing Terry Gilliam would have done for a Monty Python animation.

It's been mentioned in another thread, turning up in a 1960s book about public transport, which used a photo of a London street scene with this car pasted onto for no obvious reason.

MOC...P was a Birmingham issue of March 1976, which had several BL press cars registered in it. Cowley's SD1 from the early episodes of the Professionals was MOC229P, but had the plates retouched to MOO229R. I was also used in some episodes of the New Avengers & Return Of The Saint.

I could be a still from one of Terry Gilliam's animations from Monty Python.

I don't know anybody this has happened to, but I've heard of someone with a Triumph Herald who had a fan blade detach itself & shoot right through the bonnet!

I think they had to use the name Advantage as the LTA objected.

I think there were plans to sell a saloon Maxi with Morris badging, but as the hatchback didn't meet sales expectations this was dropped.

A lot of small de-franchised BL dealers seemed to start selling a Japanese cars. It wasn't until the mid 1970s that the BL dealerships were fully merged, & the Wedge was relaunched as the Princess after being sold for a few months under the Austin, Morris & Wolsley brands.