**The Reliant Robin: A Symbol of British Engineering**

In the 1970s, the Reliant Robin became a staple in British engineering, known for its affordability and reliability. However, despite its popularity among a loyal customer base, the company struggled to maintain its reputation outside of this niche market.

The miners' strike of 1979 was a significant moment in British history, with the workers demanding higher wages and better working conditions. The union's success in negotiating these concessions led to increased tensions between the government and the miners, ultimately resulting in the introduction of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979.

Thatcher's leadership style was marked by a hardline approach to labor disputes, which would later be put to the test during the coal miners' strike of 1984. The strike, sparked by plans to cut coal production and increase efficiency, saw widespread protests and industrial action. Unfortunately for the miners, Thatcher's government had secretly stockpiled coal, rendering them powerless to negotiate.

The consequences of this decision were devastating for the mining community. Twenty mines were closed, resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs and a significant blow to the local economy. The miners' union was severely weakened, and their reputation suffered as a result.

Reliant's struggles began to become apparent during this period. As the company struggled to maintain its market share, it became increasingly reliant on its customer base for support. However, the fact that Reliant sold only half a million cars over its lifetime meant that losing a small number of customers could have significant consequences.

The mini Cooper, built by British Motor Corporation and its successors, was a far more successful model. Its reputation as a reliable and affordable vehicle helped to establish it as a favorite among British drivers. In contrast, the Reliant Robin's cheap construction methods made it less appealing to consumers outside of its loyal customer base.

Reliant's poor reputation outside of its core market was further exacerbated by its appearance in popular culture. The company's cars were frequently mocked and ridiculed, particularly on the BBC's Top Gear program. This negative publicity took a significant toll on Reliant's sales and ultimately contributed to the company's decline.

The 1990s saw several attempts to revive the Reliant brand, including bankruptcy filings and changes in ownership. However, despite these efforts, the company was unable to recover from its decline.

Today, the Reliant Robin is remembered as a symbol of British engineering, albeit one with significant flaws. The company's struggles serve as a cautionary tale about the importance of maintaining a strong reputation outside of a core market. As Uncle Jeremy Clarkson so aptly put it, owning a Reliant Robin is like having a family pet - you can play with its differential and watch it roll over in a spectacular display.

The last remaining Reliant factory in Tamworth closed in 1998, marking the end of an era for British engineering. Despite this, the company continues to sell spare parts for its old cars, a testament to its enduring legacy.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is a Reliant Robin you probably know it from the most infamous Top Gear bit of all time oh no what if I told you that they lost how did top gear fake their most famous segment ever and what's it like to actually drive this thing all right I don't know why they keep making me drive cars today we're gonna get behind the wheel of this tiny British three-wheeler and find out hopefully I don't flip my second car all right so we have a Reliant Robin we're in a mountain yeah the steering wheel only moves like it's directly connected to that front wheel so it only moves like three degrees right to left I get like a lot of resistance if I go past like two o'clock really yeah I don't know how to explain it like it feels like I'm driving a wheelbarrow oh also there's rocks oh no oh right the back wheels I forgot I mean honestly man it is like insanely slow but not like comic both leaning all right going uphill let's give it the beans all right we're cooking baby you know whether it's accurate or not talk here really did put the fear of the Robin in me especially since I've tipped a car before and wrecked the four-wheeled car that I'm just gonna kill us both that honestly it's pretty sweet now although many Americans know about the Robin from Top Gear ReliOn had actually been making these three-wheelers since the mid 30s their first one was called the region and it was basically a motorcycle with a van on the back of it we're lying second three-wheeler was called the Regal and it came out in 1956 finally the robin dropped in 1973 nearly 40 Years of three-wheel experience went into this thing here it barely looks like a motorcycle at all besides the front wheel but why would a company spend so much time building three-wheeled cars in the first place well Reliant was based in a town called Tamworth which according to this map was a town surrounded by over 20 coal mines which would be key to Reliance initial success it was a city steeped in mining tradition and miners needed cheap Transportation you could buy a robin for 801 pounds that's ten thousand dollars in today's money car cars were very economical to registered and sure fuel economy still good this thing gets 60 miles to the gallon but most importantly you didn't need a full driver's license to drive one on the road in the Top Gear segment a robin owner mentions that a lot of miners got to work on a motorcycle but there's one problem with motorcycles they ain't got no roofs in northern England get snow the region the Regal and the robin fit the bill the affordable nature of these cars meant that they were very popular in Britain's working class so I think it's pretty obvious why Reliant decided to build a cheap car for the working people that inhabited their City now this Reliant we have here is actually the super Robin which means it has a 850 cc four banger with a whopping 40 horsepower the curb weight though is only 961 pounds so you put those two facts together and you get a face melting 0-60 time of 16.1 seconds and a top speed of 85 miles an hour no wonder they call it this super Robin it is the race car version of a robin and you know what race cars have black sand windows we got a window with hinges does it stop no no I really do like this shade of white it's like a very yellow white it's like a cashmere white the back of it is like a really nice Volkswagen Rabbit and the front looks like a Honda Civic yeah those things got everything look look at the tiny lawnmower battery the engine is behind the front wheel that's super soft all right so the suspension does not inspire a lot of confidence but this interior actually looks pretty decent the entire interior looks to be made from vacuum foreign plastic feels like my grandpa's briefcase from the 80s I mean I like where the gauges are I like how many gauges there are I like the controls super simple this is a really nice example of a really quirky car I'm going to set 100 but the question is will it flip there's only one way to find out yeah I get to drive it all right Jaybird this is a three-wheeled car I don't have a lot of confidence in this thing or in myself in fact I'm downright terrifying I believe in Jaybird thanks Jaybird let's see if we can take this turn without flipping this thing over huh let's go Smith honestly dude on that left-hand turn if you didn't have a passenger that would be scary but we did not tip this thing is actually more stable than I thought it was which brings me to my next point that famous Top Gear segment was all fake in a 2016 column for the Sunday Times Jeremy Clarkson himself admitted that the robin segment was fabricated and that quote a normal rely on Robin will not roll unless a drunken rugby team is on hand Robin owners knew this for a long time and people who know the TV is fake weren't surprised to learn that this TV show was fake but some people were dumb so it was news to them so how did top gear do it well in his column Clarkson says quote with us the Buck Room boys play around with the differentials so that the poor little thing rolled over every time I turned the steering wheel alright so after watching the top here segment hundreds and hundreds of dozens of times it's hard to say what they did to the differential to help it roll over it's possible that a limited slip differential would direct more power to the outside wheel during a turn promoting rotation and increasing weight transfer to the outside now granted that's just my theory but the Top Gear team did make other changes besides the supposed differential we found the website for the Reliant motor club where the owners of the site were actually on set for the shoot they say that the Top Gear crew replaced the front wheel with the larger one which moved the center of gravity higher up making Clarkson's three-wheeler very unbalanced compared to the stock robber with Jeremy Clarkson in the driver's seat on the right side of the car and only performing left-hand turns the Robin was ready to roll over the wheelie in the segment was done with the second modified car you can see that it's got a reliant badge on the hood the car that rolled didn't follow the money but it's not this Top Gear segment that killed the Reliant Robin it's actually something completely unrelated we'll do it again foreign coal was incredibly valuable to the British economy if the miners went on strike everybody felt it in the 1970s they struck twice asking for higher wages and they won both times in 1979 a lady named Margaret Thatcher came to power and she said yo guys this cannot happen again but then in 1984 it happened again the miners were protesting against Plans to cut coal production which would put jobs at risk but they didn't know that Thatcher was a sneaky lady and she had secret sneaky cool stockpiles and they essentially lost all of their leverage and shortly after the strike 20 mines were closed lots of miners lost their jobs and had little support now why is this important well as I mentioned miners loved their Robins with a lot of miners out of work and British cold production slowing down in favor of cleaner energy sources and cheaper foreign coal Reliant could not rely on their customer space to buy new cars anytime soon now I know it sounds insane that losing a relatively small number of customers could Doom a company but Reliant only sold about half a million cars over a course of its life if you're going to sell something cheap you need to sell tons of them to survive and relying didn't by comparison British Motor Corporation and its successors sold over 5 million of the original two-door mini cooper now obviously there were other factors at play here first Reliance were built as cheaply as possible you got a piece of wood right here holding up the dash nice little wood shim yeah the cheap car sword Cuts both ways people can buy your car or they can also choose to spend a little bit extra money and get something way better which is probably why the mini sold so well Reliant just didn't have a solid reputation outside of their already loyal customer base it didn't help that Reliant was also seen as a punch line in pop culture long before Top Gear even did their episode so when things started to go downhill in the 80s there was little over line could do to recover from it the company filed for bankruptcy in late 1990 and it was bought by a firm called beans engineering then filed again in 1994. a few different investors bought Reliant through the rest of the decade the last Robin was a special edition with gold paint leather seats and alloy wheels and they called it the robin 65 commemorating 65 years of three-wheeler production the Tamworth Factory closed in 1998 and was torn down now there's a neighborhood with streets named for Reliant models Reliant is still around at a new facility but now they just sell spare parts for all their old cars thank you we just tipped it Top Gear was right I think the Cold's okay yeah dude I thought I'd hit that thing so I wrapped the front of the car onto the ground but I didn't tip it's just squatted but we're gonna see in my point yeah front right is at first I was thinking no he's just not going fast enough maybe I should give him a shot not doing that anymore so it won't tip and that's because you will hit the front fascia before it'll allow you to tip over top of your one with the flip right they probably found the same limitations we did that is why Top Gear put the big wheel on the front and mess with the dip and mess with the dip it probably remove the sway bar and probably remove the Sawyer bar it takes at least three things to make this tip and I'm not one of them just because Top Gear faked it and cheated and made these things roll does not mean by any means that this is a stable car I don't want to influence anybody to get a Reliant Robin just start hucking it around the mountains because I just took a turn at about 35 miles an hour and I buried the front end of the thing into the Rope did the Reliant Robin deserve to die that's a pretty harsh question without an obvious answer all right if you think about it the Reliant Robin and Cole had a lot in common with each other they both had Rivals that were way better options and in both cases miners were the ones who lost in the end I guess my Uncle Jeremy Clarkson said it best owning a Reliant Robin is like having a family pet and if you play with its differential it will even roll over so you can tickle it's to methis is a Reliant Robin you probably know it from the most infamous Top Gear bit of all time oh no what if I told you that they lost how did top gear fake their most famous segment ever and what's it like to actually drive this thing all right I don't know why they keep making me drive cars today we're gonna get behind the wheel of this tiny British three-wheeler and find out hopefully I don't flip my second car all right so we have a Reliant Robin we're in a mountain yeah the steering wheel only moves like it's directly connected to that front wheel so it only moves like three degrees right to left I get like a lot of resistance if I go past like two o'clock really yeah I don't know how to explain it like it feels like I'm driving a wheelbarrow oh also there's rocks oh no oh right the back wheels I forgot I mean honestly man it is like insanely slow but not like comic both leaning all right going uphill let's give it the beans all right we're cooking baby you know whether it's accurate or not talk here really did put the fear of the Robin in me especially since I've tipped a car before and wrecked the four-wheeled car that I'm just gonna kill us both that honestly it's pretty sweet now although many Americans know about the Robin from Top Gear ReliOn had actually been making these three-wheelers since the mid 30s their first one was called the region and it was basically a motorcycle with a van on the back of it we're lying second three-wheeler was called the Regal and it came out in 1956 finally the robin dropped in 1973 nearly 40 Years of three-wheel experience went into this thing here it barely looks like a motorcycle at all besides the front wheel but why would a company spend so much time building three-wheeled cars in the first place well Reliant was based in a town called Tamworth which according to this map was a town surrounded by over 20 coal mines which would be key to Reliance initial success it was a city steeped in mining tradition and miners needed cheap Transportation you could buy a robin for 801 pounds that's ten thousand dollars in today's money car cars were very economical to registered and sure fuel economy still good this thing gets 60 miles to the gallon but most importantly you didn't need a full driver's license to drive one on the road in the Top Gear segment a robin owner mentions that a lot of miners got to work on a motorcycle but there's one problem with motorcycles they ain't got no roofs in northern England get snow the region the Regal and the robin fit the bill the affordable nature of these cars meant that they were very popular in Britain's working class so I think it's pretty obvious why Reliant decided to build a cheap car for the working people that inhabited their City now this Reliant we have here is actually the super Robin which means it has a 850 cc four banger with a whopping 40 horsepower the curb weight though is only 961 pounds so you put those two facts together and you get a face melting 0-60 time of 16.1 seconds and a top speed of 85 miles an hour no wonder they call it this super Robin it is the race car version of a robin and you know what race cars have black sand windows we got a window with hinges does it stop no no I really do like this shade of white it's like a very yellow white it's like a cashmere white the back of it is like a really nice Volkswagen Rabbit and the front looks like a Honda Civic yeah those things got everything look look at the tiny lawnmower battery the engine is behind the front wheel that's super soft all right so the suspension does not inspire a lot of confidence but this interior actually looks pretty decent the entire interior looks to be made from vacuum foreign plastic feels like my grandpa's briefcase from the 80s I mean I like where the gauges are I like how many gauges there are I like the controls super simple this is a really nice example of a really quirky car I'm going to set 100 but the question is will it flip there's only one way to find out yeah I get to drive it all right Jaybird this is a three-wheeled car I don't have a lot of confidence in this thing or in myself in fact I'm downright terrifying I believe in Jaybird thanks Jaybird let's see if we can take this turn without flipping this thing over huh let's go Smith honestly dude on that left-hand turn if you didn't have a passenger that would be scary but we did not tip this thing is actually more stable than I thought it was which brings me to my next point that famous Top Gear segment was all fake in a 2016 column for the Sunday Times Jeremy Clarkson himself admitted that the robin segment was fabricated and that quote a normal rely on Robin will not roll unless a drunken rugby team is on hand Robin owners knew this for a long time and people who know the TV is fake weren't surprised to learn that this TV show was fake but some people were dumb so it was news to them so how did top gear do it well in his column Clarkson says quote with us the Buck Room boys play around with the differentials so that the poor little thing rolled over every time I turned the steering wheel alright so after watching the top here segment hundreds and hundreds of dozens of times it's hard to say what they did to the differential to help it roll over it's possible that a limited slip differential would direct more power to the outside wheel during a turn promoting rotation and increasing weight transfer to the outside now granted that's just my theory but the Top Gear team did make other changes besides the supposed differential we found the website for the Reliant motor club where the owners of the site were actually on set for the shoot they say that the Top Gear crew replaced the front wheel with the larger one which moved the center of gravity higher up making Clarkson's three-wheeler very unbalanced compared to the stock robber with Jeremy Clarkson in the driver's seat on the right side of the car and only performing left-hand turns the Robin was ready to roll over the wheelie in the segment was done with the second modified car you can see that it's got a reliant badge on the hood the car that rolled didn't follow the money but it's not this Top Gear segment that killed the Reliant Robin it's actually something completely unrelated we'll do it again foreign coal was incredibly valuable to the British economy if the miners went on strike everybody felt it in the 1970s they struck twice asking for higher wages and they won both times in 1979 a lady named Margaret Thatcher came to power and she said yo guys this cannot happen again but then in 1984 it happened again the miners were protesting against Plans to cut coal production which would put jobs at risk but they didn't know that Thatcher was a sneaky lady and she had secret sneaky cool stockpiles and they essentially lost all of their leverage and shortly after the strike 20 mines were closed lots of miners lost their jobs and had little support now why is this important well as I mentioned miners loved their Robins with a lot of miners out of work and British cold production slowing down in favor of cleaner energy sources and cheaper foreign coal Reliant could not rely on their customer space to buy new cars anytime soon now I know it sounds insane that losing a relatively small number of customers could Doom a company but Reliant only sold about half a million cars over a course of its life if you're going to sell something cheap you need to sell tons of them to survive and relying didn't by comparison British Motor Corporation and its successors sold over 5 million of the original two-door mini cooper now obviously there were other factors at play here first Reliance were built as cheaply as possible you got a piece of wood right here holding up the dash nice little wood shim yeah the cheap car sword Cuts both ways people can buy your car or they can also choose to spend a little bit extra money and get something way better which is probably why the mini sold so well Reliant just didn't have a solid reputation outside of their already loyal customer base it didn't help that Reliant was also seen as a punch line in pop culture long before Top Gear even did their episode so when things started to go downhill in the 80s there was little over line could do to recover from it the company filed for bankruptcy in late 1990 and it was bought by a firm called beans engineering then filed again in 1994. a few different investors bought Reliant through the rest of the decade the last Robin was a special edition with gold paint leather seats and alloy wheels and they called it the robin 65 commemorating 65 years of three-wheeler production the Tamworth Factory closed in 1998 and was torn down now there's a neighborhood with streets named for Reliant models Reliant is still around at a new facility but now they just sell spare parts for all their old cars thank you we just tipped it Top Gear was right I think the Cold's okay yeah dude I thought I'd hit that thing so I wrapped the front of the car onto the ground but I didn't tip it's just squatted but we're gonna see in my point yeah front right is at first I was thinking no he's just not going fast enough maybe I should give him a shot not doing that anymore so it won't tip and that's because you will hit the front fascia before it'll allow you to tip over top of your one with the flip right they probably found the same limitations we did that is why Top Gear put the big wheel on the front and mess with the dip and mess with the dip it probably remove the sway bar and probably remove the Sawyer bar it takes at least three things to make this tip and I'm not one of them just because Top Gear faked it and cheated and made these things roll does not mean by any means that this is a stable car I don't want to influence anybody to get a Reliant Robin just start hucking it around the mountains because I just took a turn at about 35 miles an hour and I buried the front end of the thing into the Rope did the Reliant Robin deserve to die that's a pretty harsh question without an obvious answer all right if you think about it the Reliant Robin and Cole had a lot in common with each other they both had Rivals that were way better options and in both cases miners were the ones who lost in the end I guess my Uncle Jeremy Clarkson said it best owning a Reliant Robin is like having a family pet and if you play with its differential it will even roll over so you can tickle it's to me