My Dad had a Morris Minor - Ministry of Pensions car when I was little - very safe car as can be shown by the fact that as a toddler to about age 4 I generally travelled standing on the transmission tunnel with one hand on each front seat
ANyway - he decided to buy a car of his own and got a Cortins Mark 1 Super
Brilliant car!
Swapped that after a few years for a MArk 1 Capri - Great car except for the suspension - kept making banging noises
eventually if had been replecaed so many times in the first yea rthat Ford took it back and took it apart at the factory
was great after that but Dad was disabled and had lost confidence in it so he sold it a short time after
For an Avenger - I remember one of the main selling points was that it was less than £1000 brand new!!!
back axle fell out of in in 9 months - just before he and I were due to travel to London to see Liverpool in the FA Cup Final!!!
The garage took it back and swapped it for a Hillman Hunter - base model - worked well - but no character - just did its job and that was it
anyway - he then went onto 2 Renault 12s - first a base one then an TS - both were wonderful and fault free and the TS went like crazy (twin webbers)
He then went back to Ford and got a Capri again - a Calypso model - 2 tone grey
it was beautiful and great to drive with unnecessary wide wheels for a 1.6!
lots of problems with the front seats - fabric ripping and seams splitting but otherwise a good car
At some point he had a Honda Accord when they first came over - lovely, classy, well equiped, good performance, different
great
Then it went downhill FAST!
he got a Maestro - he was feeling guilty about not supporting the UK car industry
We used to joke that every time you shut a door anoth random piece of plastic fell off somewhere - except that it was not a joke
great for round town driving with very light steering and good economy
carp for anything else
replaced that ( before the guarantee ran out!!) with a Rover 213 - on the grounds that it was a colaboration with Honda with Honda checking standards
Nice car - few problems - all with the Rover bits not the Honda engine - but OK, no mor ethan that
replaced it with a ROver 216 - colaboration had finished and instead of a Honda engine it has an R Series ROver engine
Big end broke after a couple of hundred miles
Seen at one point in a roped off part of teh garage with the engine in literally individual bit and being boxed up by Rover engineers
came back with a new engine and renewed guarantee
that was the end of the UK based cars!
In the middle of all that my Mum (i.e. me because my Mum had stopped driving) had a Datsun 120Y - which started whenever you wanted - including after sitting still for 10 weeks while I was a University - when the second spark plug fired. How any petrol had got to the carb at that point was a mystery
wonder full car - never failed - until one day I jacked it up to rotate the wheels and it fell down as the jack went through the jacking point and a pile of rust landed on the floor
the bottom had been DIY undersealed and some petrol has compromised it when some had overflowed. Water got under the underseal and it rust badly
sold it and I got a Ford Fiesta - first car I ever owned myself!
anyway - by the now it was the 1980s - so I will end here!