Five automotive orphans we would love to own today

Monday, 20 May 2019

Sad little automotive orphans created either through a misguided collaboration, misplaced confidence or utter incompetence may well be largely reviled when new, but give them the luxury of time and they can become brilliant things we desire. Admittedly irrationally. Here are five of the oddest little automotive orphans we would love to have tucked away in our garage today.

Alfa Romeo Arna

​The Arna was a simply magnificent example of how to do a car wrong. It was the early 1980s and both Nissan and Alfa Romeo were losing money, so why not collaborate?

The problem was that the Japanese company handled the styling (bland, boxy and generic), while the Italian company handled the powertrain, electrics and production (spectacular unreliability and the rust! Oh, the rust…).

**READ MORE:

* Cars you probably didn't know Kia built

* Five cars that really shouldn't make a comeback

* Lotus Elan masterpiece not the most reliable**

As a result, the Arna was bland looking, broke down a lot and disintegrated like a Berocca on a hungover morning.

It's awesomely cool because of its sheer awfulness now, of course, and we would dearly love to have one, except almost none exist anymore, with just two examples being officially recorded on UK roads…

Mazda Roadpacer AP

As unlikely as the concept would be to rational people, someone at Mazda actually thought 'I know, let's put a rotary in a 1,600kg Holden' when the company was considering building a large executive car that could sneak around road tax brackets in Japan.

What's even more unlikely is that, instead of firing that person for being an idiot, Mazda actually did it.

The Mazda Roadpacer started life as a Holden Premier that was shipped to Japan without an engine, where Mazda dropped a 97kW/138Nm 13B rotary engine into its cavernous engine bay.

Yes, it was as slow as it sounded, used massive amounts of fuel and was twice as expensive as anything else in its segment. No, it wasn't a success.

Nissan Ute

The Button Plan was a thoroughly ingenious plan in the 1980s to reduce government subsidies of the Aussie car industry by forcing rationalisation on it. The plan was well thought out and completely understood the automotive industry in Australia.

Just kidding, it was actually the exact opposite of all those things and forced companies to team up and offer rebadged versions of each others cars, which as it turned out, was exactly what Aussie car buyers didn't want.

It did, however, unleash some brilliantly weird cars onto the Aussie market, the absolute best of which was the rebadged Ford Falcon ute sold by Nissan as the 'Nissan Ute'. You can tell by the name that they weren't really committed to the concept…

Trekka

​While most Kiwi car fans are familiar with the Trekka story, for those who aren't, it was basically a locally designed and built light commercial vehicle that looked like an off-roader, but wasn't, built on the platform of a sedan. A Skoda Octavia, to be precise.

It was pretty useless off road (at least until a limited slip diff was developed locally), but it was surprisingly popular with 2,500 eventually being built.

The Trekka was even exported to Australia (unsuccessfully) and various Pacific Islands, with CKD assembly even starting in Indonesia.

Mysteriously, General Motors even had one exported to the USA for some unknown reason. A coffee table, perhaps?

​Kia Elan

In the mid-1990s when Lotus was desperate for money and Kia was desperate for credibility, the former sold the latter the tooling and production rights for the Elan, a small, light sportscar Lotus had revived to counter the threat of the Mazda MX-5. Spectacularly unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

To the horror of the UK motoring press, Kia continued production of the Elan after Lotus lost interest, jamming its own 1.8-litre petrol engine in the front in place of the Isuzu 1.5-litre turbo unit.

Kia's production run of around 1,000 units added to the Elan's relatively dismal sales of around 5,000 or so cars by the time production ended in 1989. Or when the MX-5 was closing in on half a million sales…