Reliant documentary 1997

[ETCHY]

Not sure if seen before but I found it quite interesting.

Should be called "hoping against hope", kind of sad, as to be honest they didn't stand a chance really.
Got to love a Reliant though !

 

[MrBiscuits]

I watched this on the telly when I was 17! Look forward to seeing it again.

Weren't they fitting recon engines because their supplier had smashed the tooling over an unpaid debt?

[garethj]

I saw this at the time and I’ve always had a soft spot for Reliant.  In the video is Tim Bishop of Tatra & Connaught companies, probably brought in because he used to work for Jaguar like the new boss.

In the mid ‘90s I worked for a company that made radiators for Reliant, I think they used the plastic header tanks we used on aftermarket Mini radiators and whatever type of copper brass core was cheapest.  After they’d gone bust yet again and left a load of unpaid bills we didn’t give them credit terms (usually 60 days) or even a cheque, their driver had to turn up with cash or he wasn’t allowed to take anything.

As ever with British manufacturers, they had some good ideas and could probably engineer things well but the financial acumen and market research was pitiful.  Just look at the machine tooling they had, can you imagine that happening in a small German company? 

[Wilko220]

Yeah remember watching this at the time and then again a few years later. Great documentary - but the optimistic note it ends on brings a bit of a tear to the eye now, knowing the outcome.

[barrett]

Blimey, I was 11 when this aired and coming to the end of my Reliant obsession, but it still got taped off the telly and re-watched although I don't actually remember much about it - unlike the Car's The Star episode on Reliant, which I must have seen about 200 times as a kid.

1 hour ago, garethj said:

I saw this at the time and I’ve always had a soft spot for Reliant.  In the video is Tim Bishop of Tatra & Connaught companies, probably brought in because he used to work for Jaguar like the new boss.

What was Tim's role here? I will have to ask him about this as I wasn't aware he was involved at all

[garethj]

1 minute ago, barrett said:

Blimey, I was 11 when this aired and coming to the end of my Reliant obsession, but it still got taped off the telly and re-watched although I don't actually remember much about it - unlike the Car's The Star episode on Reliant, which I must have seen about 200 times as a kid.

What was Tim's role here? I will have to ask him about this as I wasn't aware he was involved at all

He’s shown in one of the engineering meetings when they’re talking about new cars.  I don’t think he says anything on camera though.

[barrett]

3 minutes ago, garethj said:

He’s shown in one of the engineering meetings when they’re talking about new cars.  I don’t think he says anything on camera though.

Ah. Knowing Tim his solution would have been some sort of high-concept carbon-chassied high-performance two-stroke sports car designed entirely from the ground up, but with Lada switchgear or something, resulting in a 'We'll be in touch' from Mr H.

[barrett]

Ah, here's the other Reliant program

 

[lesapandre]

When you drove up the A5 you used to go right past the factory. Demolished now of course and replaced by housing as have most of the Midlands car factories.

[wesacosa]

I must scratch the Reliant itch some time.  Sadly I think I might have missed out on the Kittens and Mk1 Robins which would have been my first choice seeing prices these days, and the later Robins and Rialtos don't qualify for ULEZ so may have missed the boat altogether

 

[barrett]

24 minutes ago, wesacosa said:

I must scratch the Reliant itch some time.  Sadly I think I might have missed out on the Kittens and Mk1 Robins which would have been my first choice seeing prices these days, and the later Robins and Rialtos don't qualify for ULEZ so may have missed the boat altogether

 

I was looking at this earlier, needs a bit of fettling but looks really great and un-messed with. Not a bad price either.
https://www.carandclassic.com/car/C1424042

[wesacosa]

16 minutes ago, barrett said:

I was looking at this earlier, needs a bit of fettling but looks really great and un-messed with. Not a bad price either.
https://www.carandclassic.com/car/C1424042

nice.  Rebel was never really on my wishlist but that looks a good project for someone

[wesacosa]

this looked appealing too

https://www.carandclassic.com/car/C1419441

[garethj]

1 hour ago, barrett said:

I was looking at this earlier, needs a bit of fettling but looks really great and un-messed with. Not a bad price either.
https://www.carandclassic.com/car/C1424042

I ❤️ the Rebel.  In the late ‘80s when I should have been studying for my automotive engineering course I was in the Lanchester library looking at the World Cars Catalogues of the ‘60s.  It was a time when classic motorsport was just taking off and I reckoned a RWD car with a famously tuneable engine and weighing 50kg less than a Mk1 Mini would be just the job.

Sadly I realised after graduating that a design engineer was unlikely to be highly paid so the idea was shelved.  Still a really cool little car though 

[ETCHY]

The Rebel is a really cool looking little car. I like the Kitten but the front end never looked quite right somehow to my eyes.

With the threat of rampant inflation,  and a cost of living crisis, small cheap economical cars like Reliant's are what folk would once have turned to as "get you there" type economy transport..

 

 

[meggersdog]

Funnily enough myself and a few others from the business park where I work were giving Matt Tomkins a hand putting a Rebel van body on to it's repaired chassis this afternoon.  Practical Classics workshop is a few doors down from my workshop and Matt called in on the offchance I wasn't too busy.

[dollywobbler]

I've just read an interesting book by Andy Plumb about these later years of Reliant. All sorts of batshit stuff going on, like trying to update the Kitten (yes, over a decade after it went out of production), building a four-wheeled Bond Bug and even dabbling with EVs - Bishop was a consultant developing fuel injection for the Reliant engine.

[garethj]

37 minutes ago, dollywobbler said:

I've just read an interesting book by Andy Plumb about these later years of Reliant. All sorts of batshit stuff going on, like trying to update the Kitten (yes, over a decade after it went out of production), building a four-wheeled Bond Bug and even dabbling with EVs - Bishop was a consultant developing fuel injection for the Reliant engine.

Is it good?  I’ve seen it on Amazon but it’s a bit pricey to buy on a whim.

Tim Bishop got the Tatra business by offering to develop fuel injection for the 613 but he then got the contract to develop the whole vehicle 

[Timewaster]

That kid Dan must be on here.

[High Jetter]

2 hours ago, meggersdog said:

Funnily enough myself and a few others from the business park where I work were giving Matt Tomkins a hand putting a Rebel van body on to it's repaired chassis this afternoon.  Practical Classics workshop is a few doors down from my workshop and Matt called in on the offchance I wasn't too busy.

Ah, do you do their MOT's? Must be challenging!

[Stroller133]

16 hours ago, lesapandre said:

When you drove up the A5 you used to go right past the factory. Demolished now of course and replaced by housing as have most of the Midlands car factories.

The A5 has also been bypassed since then. If I remember correctly the factory reduced in size before closing and south side became a factory called Probus? 
I have more memories of the Kettlebrook factory. I recall waiting in my Dad's Robin whilst he was at a motor factors called Car-Bar, you could see the Reliant sign of the factory from the car park. When I did my paper round in the 90s I often passed the factory on the Glascote side, but it was solely the Metrocab factory by then. 
There was a Reliant dealer on the Glascote Road, about half a mile from the Kettlebrook factory, S R Tomson & son. They later bacame a Proton dealer and perhaps  a Citroen dealer for a while. 

[meggersdog]

8 hours ago, High Jetter said:

Ah, do you do their MOT's? Must be challenging!

Yeah, I'm the balding,fat scruffy bloke often pictured in Dannys staff car sagas. I also do Land Rover Owners MoTs so occaisonally my ugly mug is in there too.

[dollywobbler]

17 hours ago, garethj said:

Is it good?  I’ve seen it on Amazon but it’s a bit pricey to buy on a whim.

Tim Bishop got the Tatra business by offering to develop fuel injection for the 613 but he then got the contract to develop the whole vehicle 

Yes, it is good. It's a bit 'self published' in places, in terms of writing style, but the content is good and I found it very interesting. Lots of photos though, so I read it easily in one evening... (albeit one evening all alone in a hotel room with nothing else to do).

[sierraman]

Just watching it now, they couldn’t get credit for £20 on some bulbs. Piss funny. I admire their optimism but this was in the year of Citroen offering 0% finance on a Citroen Saxo. They had no chance!!

[ETCHY]

More i watch it and think about it more tragic it is.

Folk giving up jobs to go back as they wanted to work there, the final hope for the future at the end.

Outdated product, lack of funds, no real willingness to change how stuff is done to increase efficiency  ( witness argument over building bodies), it was never going to work.. very sad.

[sierraman]

6 minutes ago, ETCHY said:

More i watch it and think about it more tragic it is.

Folk giving up jobs to go back as they wanted to work there, the final hope for the future at the end.

Outdated product, lack of funds, no real willingness to change how stuff is done to increase efficiency  ( witness argument over building bodies), it was never going to work.. very sad.

It seems almost unbelievable that they had such a labour intensive process even 25 years ago. When you look back they never seemed to stick to anything consistently apart from the Scimitar and the three wheelers, a concept that was considered obsolete by the late sixties. 

It surprised me that Jonathan Haynes invested in such a scheme unless he was blinded by sentimentality, you’d have credited him with a bit more acumen given his background. 

[Dobloseven]

I suppose the market for three wheelers was unique to the UK and once Bond was out the way, Reliant had the market cornered for many years. They'd got a captive market of customers with motorbike licences only and could basically sell them anything. That market would eventually dwindle to a few diehards. The small four wheelers were only ever going to be tiny sellers. Wish I'd still got the Kitten I bought for 100 quid in the mid eighties though! Heynes seemed obsessed with making a small sports car, though by 1996 the MX5 was well established with the MGF on the way and the Elise as well.The Scimitar SS never really caught on so how he hoped to succeed I don't quite know. Interesting to watch with hindsight, though. The history of the UK specialist car industry, with tiny companies limping from one new owner who thinks he can make a difference, to the next is always fascinating to me. 

[sierraman]

The world had moved on, even if the product was good they didn’t have the scale, unless it’s a high end niche product you need to be making tens of thousands of them to be turning a profit. In any case NCAP and emissions would have seen them off years ago. 

[Dobloseven]

Thing is, the Robin or whatever isn't a car, never was. It's a motorised tricycle and as such is subject to totally different safety and emissions regulations to a conventional car. In a similar way, things like the Renault Twizy, Citroën Ami and the French microcars are classed as quadricycles.Probably best avoid accidents in them though! Incredibly after the programme was filmed, Robins continued to be made on and off for another 6 years, being facelifted along the way, in other factories,going more and more up market. Final ones were £10k in 2002.To put it into context, I used to pay a lot less than that for top spec Fiat Doblos. 

[barrett]

You have to remember that at its peak, I guess the early 1970s, Reliant was the second-biggest British car maker after BMC. They literally couldn't build Robins fast enough so high was the demand, and the Scimitar was pretty much universally praised by the press and owners (albeit at a time when 'being British' was enough to convince a lot of people of a product's merits), plus lots of lucrative GRP work for other firms, prototyping, council contract work with TW9s, external market production etc. Even in the 1980s they were still riding a high - think how ubiquitous the Rialto once was - so it's easy to see why the people involved couldn't understand why they'd gone from global success to dismal failure in such a short space of time. The things they were building had been massively lucrative for 40 years and they had a captive market all to themselves. Fifteen years is a long time in the car industry, but it wasn't like one of those slow, painful declines to the people working there. One day everything was great, and the next it was totally fucked. It was never going to survive, but I can understand the reason why people tried.