It's hard to think where to begin with the Austin Allegro, a car of such staggeringly, stupefyingly misguided design and production incompetence it's hard to comprehend. Just look at it! It is without doubt one of the most ungainly, poorly proportioned cars ever unleashed on the world. Apparently, the original stylist had something far more lithe and graceful in mind, but unfortunately, he made the terrible mistake of working for British Leyland, a car company that would have had trouble producing an amateur dramatics production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, let alone something as complicated as an actual car.
It's hard to exaggerate just how badly BL screwed this car up. It was originally designed to fight the new wave of exotic and avant-garde hatchbacks that were cropping up all over continental Europe, but management decided that a hatchback configuration was still a tad controversial and ooh la la for us Brits, so they stuck an old fashioned saloon style boot on it. Then the engineers inisited on fitting BL's wheezy, underpowered and hideously tall B-series engine, which buggered up the styling even more. Then, in an instance of seizing defeat from the very jaws of victory - something which BL excelled at - some idiot in the design or marketing department thought it would be a BRILLIANT idea if they gave this upturned bathtub on wheels a SQUARE steering wheel - I kid you not. The poor thing was hamstrung from the start. A scant year before Volkswagen gave the world the genre-defining Golf in 1974, British Leyland foisted this atrocious lash-up on an unsuspecting market.
Of course, the story doesn't end there - once they'd finished buggering up it's development and actually got this pig faced disaster of a car into production, they hurled it together so badly that it started to fall apart after mere months of existence. British Leyland had an unshakeable belief that if a car had to rust, it might as well start doing so on the production line, and as it's going to get dents over the course of its life, it might as well leave the factory with panel filler already applied.
As you'd expect, this reputation for being ugly, wheezy, unreliable and poorly made pretty much killed the Allegro in export markets, but it didn't seem to dent British enthusiasm for the little underdog, as it managed to soldier on for 10 years, 3 facelifts and just over 640,000 examples.
Over that time, the Allegro did get a little bit better, and by 1980 had actually turned into a vaguely (make that VERY vaguely) decent car. Unfortunately, British Leyland, Leyland or Austin-Rover, as it was known that week, undid all their good work a scant four years later in 1984, when they replaced the Allegro with the equally incompetent Austin Maestro.... but that's another story, for another time....
It's hard to think where to begin with the Austin Allegro, a car of such staggeringly, stupefyingly misguided design and production incompetence it's hard to comprehend. Just look at it! It is without doubt one of the most ungainly, poorly proportioned cars ever unleashed on the world. Apparently, the original stylist had something far more lithe and graceful in mind, but unfortunately, he made the terrible mistake of working for British Leyland, a car company that would have had trouble producing an amateur dramatics production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, let alone something as complicated as an actual car. 