Spotting some of the UK’s rarest cars | Axon’s Automotive Anorak

Once out and about on the busy UK roads on yet another typical damp and dreary day in November, the unusual events of the day continued. I soon spotted a rarely seen Reliant Rebel travelling in the opposite direction – one of only 2,600 examples of this would-be Mini-rivalling plastic four-wheeler made over a ten-year period from 1964, with just a declining 26 now still registered and in use on our roads, according to the sometimes questionably inaccurate How Many Left? (HML) website.

Had I still been a small kid, travelling in the back of one of my dad’s many Reliant Scimitar GTEs, I probably would have earned a healthy 25 points for spotting a Rebel in my old and well-thumbed i-Spy book of cars.

Following that initial surprise, virtually at every turn thereafter I seemed to spot an endless parade of rare and unusual cars braving the less-than-ideal British winter road conditions. A scarce but un-noteworthy Proton Impian, an instantly forgettable Malaysian mid-sized family saloon, mostly used as an affordable but anonymous mini cab found loitering outside railway stations a few years ago. Again, according to the HML site, a surprisingly high 37 Impians (down from 561 a decade earlier) are still pounding the King’s highways, more than I would have expected, as I’ve not seen one of these drab saloons for quite a while. I’m not sure how many points a Proton Impian would attract in an i-Spy book, but it would deserve to be quite a few I’d imagine due to its rarity, not only now, but also when current and new.

The next uncommon but welcome sight on my journey was a machine I am rather fond of: a Microcar MC1. A tiny French two-stroke GRP microcar, with boxy styling inspired by the short-lived Renault Avantime. Travelling along at a snail’s pace, driven slowly and carefully by an elderly gentleman with an excitable dog crammed into the car’s small rear quarters. It was one of a surprisingly plentiful 151 MC1 examples still on UK roads.

My next odd sighting was an immaculate Seat Arosa, the small but again unremarkable three-door entry-hatch twin of the stronger-selling (but still also rare) Volkswagen Lupo. According to HML’s figures, a low 230 Arosa models are left still taxed and road-worthy in the UK.

No sooner had the tidy Seat left my sight than an even scarcer Tesla Roadster pulled out of a side road. The Roadster was Elon Musk’s first stab at an electric car for his fledgling Tesla brand. It was a modified, Lotus Elise-based two-seater sportscar, built by Lotus in Hethel, with around 2,500 examples being made. Most of the early Tesla roadsters sold in the UK, at eye-watering prices, were left-hand drive, with right-hand drive eventually becoming available just as the model was set to be phased out. The example I spotted was a later RHD version, one of only 22 Roadsters remaining in legal highway use, joined by a further 16 Sport derivatives.

Starting to feel like a rare breed bird twitcher in automotive form, my next uncommon spot was rather less appealing than the sporting targa-topped Tesla. It was none other than a lesser-spotted CitiRover by Rover. Once again very short-lived (arguably no bad thing), the CitiRover was an increasingly desperate attempt by MG Rover Group to return the company to the sizeable B-segment supermini sector of the new car market, where the previous Austin/Rover Metro/100 used to sell in strong numbers. Conceived and built by Tata in India as the Indica, the CitiRover was supposedly modified by MG Rover to better suit British roads and its inevitable OAP customers’ tastes. These changes extended to slapping on a traditional Rover grill and badging, some plusher seat upholstery, plus apparently reconfiguring the small hatchback’s harsh ride to better suit UK roads. Rover wouldn’t let the contemporary press test drive the car, so we don’t really know if this was successfully achieved. Despite being priced far too ambitiously when new, and only available on the British market for a couple of years, 9,218 CitiRovers were sold.

Cheating a little, I took a slight detour en route to my final destination to see if a Mazda RX-7 Series 1 was still parked up in a side street that I hadn’t driven down for at least a couple of years. This probably SORNed coupe was thankfully still there, it being of keen personal interest to me as my father had an identical one, ordered brand new on the Mazda Motor Show stand when the rotary-engined coupe made its British debut in the late 1970s, his being the sixth one in the country (in metallic green with matching green tartan cloth upholstery). HML shows that a total of 208 early Mazda RX-7s are both still either on the road and declared SORN. On that same slight detour, a shabby-looking but still savable and desirable Citroën CX GTI that had sat on a driveway, partly covered, for some years obviously hadn’t moved at all since I last saw it there pre-pandemic. Although still partially exposed to the elements, the CX’s tatty cover and crumbling shelter looked to be holding the Citroën together reasonably well, sparing it from the worst the British weather could throw at it. Thank goodness, as one of just seven SORN extant examples.

Okay, seeing both the RX-7 and CX again after some time was not a chance acquaintance as I’d known that these rare cars had been there previously, but spotting more uncommon cars on this otherwise unexceptional day was about to shift up a gear or two with yet another surprise.

My automotive unicorn on this strange day of a seeing unusual vehicles out and about didn’t take long to spot with its distinctive metallic browny-gold wedge profile leaping out from the crush of the dull grey and white modern humdrum crossovers. It was a suffix N-registration Wolesley 2200 Saloon, the poshest upmarket version of British Leyland’s (BL) very short-lived 18-22 Wedge series. On sale for just a miserly six months in 1975 before BL in its questionable wisdom and poor planning decided to drop the Austin, Morris and rarest-of-all Wolesely versions of its new 18-22 Wedge range and rebrand them all under the Princess marque. The Wolseley 2200 Saloon was to be the very last model made by this historic marque – one of Britain’s oldest vehicle manufacturers – originally making its first motorcar in 1898. Just six Wedge Wolesley Saloons remain road legal today, making the chances of seeing one on the road exceptionally small. If only I still had my old i-Spy book.