PROLES' ROYCES

Emerging from the confused depths of BMC’s product-planning studios, the Wolseley Six and Austin 3 Litre offered more charm than success

- MARTIN BUCKLEY

Surprisingly, perhaps, Sir Alec Issigonis considered the Austin/Morris 1800 to be his finest hour as a car designer. A five-seater, wheel-at-each-corner piece of front-drive rationalism, what was codenamed ADO17 and colloquially known as the Landcrab took his Mini concept of compact spaciousness to its natural – but not particularly attractive – conclusion: a 13ft 11in-long, 5ft 7in-wide family saloon with more rear-seat legroom than anything this side of a Rolls-Royce Phantom.

He made no such public utterances on the subject of the closely related 1967-’71 Austin 3 Litre, other than a few ‘I told you so’ type noises when, as predicted, the new ADO61 bombed in the arenas of both expert opinion and public acceptance. Fewer than 10,000 sales across a four-year production run made the poor old 3 Litre a poster child of the British Motor Corporation’s 1960s incompetence.