Design Flashback: Redesigning Reliant’s Robin

Reliant was a truly great company. Founded in 1936 by a man in his garage, it grew rapidly and became Britain’s second biggest independent car manufacturer by the 1960s. The famous three-wheelers were topped by the Regal, which sold 130,000 and had a chassis designed by a top Formula One engineer (John Crosthwaite, who designed Graham Hill’s winning BRMs).

It had an advanced composite body (they were second in the world – after the Chevrolet Corvette – to make whole composite bodies, a year before Lotus) and they had the first all-aluminium engine in the UK, that’s still in high demand today as a race engine. That was in 1962 and it was the Reliant Regal (or ‘Delboy Van’ as we all know it).

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So successful was the three-wheeler, that it was the backbone of the company and funded the Scimitar GTE. It also formed the basis for four-wheeled cars for export as Knock-Down Kits to Turkey, Greece and the rest of the world. The successor was the Reliant Robin, and the first one was designed by none other than Tom Karen OBE.

Sadly, a succession of bad management and recessions bought the famous company to its knees… and this is when I joined, with new management (Jonathan Heynes, son of Bill Heynes who was a founder of Jaguar).

This was in 1998. I was 25 and in my second job out of Coventry University, my first being the personal designer for Far-Eastern royalty who is known for his amazing car collection.

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I was the sole designer for Reliant in what were to be their last years, and in 1998 I was asked to come up with four new models; three cars with four wheels, plus the Mk.3 Robin. This Robin sadly ended up being the only one that made it into production, and the company’s last ever vehicle.

All vehicles were modelled straight from sketches into full-size, on a very limited budget of thousands, out of high-density building foam, body filler and fibreglass.

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I had three months to facelift the Robin Mk.2 as the moulds which the new owners of Reliant had inherited were very tired indeed – we worked out that 35 litres of patternmakers’ filler was needed for each bodyshell to straighten the ripples. Considering the weight had to be kept below 450kg, and the labour involved, this couldn’t be done. So, new moulds were required – and while we were at it, a new body style to refresh the iconic little tripod.

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This was perhaps not the stereotypically glamorous design brief, or job. Certainly, a stark contrast to my last one, but it was a ‘proper’ design job, in that it was a link between automotive and product design.

The Robin was the end of the line for a product that had made millions in profit and was in high demand. Not a car to impress, more to earn a living and get from A-to-B economically, and the recipe worked. At the end, it was an iconic statement of individuality, and still is.

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I started sketching and marker-rendering some themes and these A3 sheets of paper were laid out on my desk in my portacabin for the Director to choose his direction. The go-ahead was given, and I chose an old Mk.2 Master Model (a dimensionally stable full-size bodyshell made from 25mm-thick fibreglass on an oak frame) that had been sitting outside for about 10 years as my basis and forklifted it onto a trailer.

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I towed this behind a Scimitar GTC (example pictured above) up to Fletcher Speedboats in Cannock Chase that was also owned, like Reliant, by Kevin Leech, a pharmaceuticals and dotcom millionaire. Fletchers’ patternshop could house the Robin while I used their tools, materials and labour.

The patternshop turned out to be a barn with a rippled, sloping concrete floor and nothing like a surface plate or any measuring facilities. So, we wedged the master with the aid of a spirit level to where we thought it should be. There were no drawings or references about the correct attitude of the body, and all the production cars sat differently on the ground – I measured seven different ride heights!

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As the internet wasn’t really around, I went to a library to research lamp dimensions and Legal Projections for EC regulations. This took another week out of the tight time frame.

With regards to the law, the Robin is an oddity as it really only survived because of ‘Grandfather Rights’ with the authorities, and changing too much, while incurring steep type-approval costs, would also risk the vehicle not passing newer, tighter regulations.

The management had, in that time, decided to keep the Ford Escort Van taillights and the Ford Fiesta Mk.2 headlights, for type approval reasons, so for maximum differentiation, all the body was to be resurfaced around unchanged door apertures and glass – but replacing the doors themselves for the first time since the Tom Karen original.

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So, with rasps, filler and sandpaper in hand, I created a new style to the Mk.2, with a succession of larger front grilles to try and solve the cooling issues. Thankfully, once the management saw the result they decided to try new headlamps, as the larger grille looked a little ‘Vanden Plas’ – some would say ‘putting lipstick on a pig’, maybe.

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New lights from scratch are prohibitively expensive, so the development costs and type approval costs would’ve run into more money than the budget allowed. I was limited to off-the-shelf items produced by companies such as Hella, or items from Ford or Vauxhall, as they usually gave permission to use their lights free of charge – Rover wanted £10,000 as a licence fee to use the Rover 100 taillights I considered!

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So, Vauxhall Corsa B headlights were chosen. There was no information about how to mount them out of the box onto the Robin, so I devised a rig using a plank of 25mm plywood, some fibreglass mountings I made up, some wooden wedges and the headlamp beam alignment-checking unit from the production line.

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With the lights mounted to the plank by pivots on a couple of old chairs, and linked up to a car battery, I could align them in a test as though they were on the line, fix them into place on the plank. I could then transport the assembly up to Cannock from the Tamworth factory in the boot of my car, where they would be placed in the front of the new master.

I was told there was no room for error, as there were to be no prototypes and the production molds were to be taken directly from my model-making!

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I marked up the front of the master, keeping the front licence plate as I knew it was in a legal position, and air-sawed the last month’s work onto the floor. The plank of legally spaced lights was inserted into the space at the legal height, with high-density squirty foam placed around them, and modelling started.

The foglight plugs were made for the correct viewing angles, and recesses built around them – the idea was to provide obvious holes so that people felt compelled to upgrade.

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As budgets were so tight, all bodily adornments like drip-rails and trim were removed, reducing external suppliers and the need for unnecessary production costs. It also referenced Tom Karen’s original design intent of no drip rails, with water management being taken care of by the roof and pillar surfaces.

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To fit around the Corsa headlights’ lens contours, and make assembly easier, a nosecone was necessary to reduce the gap between body and lens. This also makes replacing the panel in the event of an accident easier, and facelifting or model differentiation easy too. The forthcoming pickup and electric models would need it.

The headlamp beam adjustment holes were made under the nosecone, by marking around a two-pence coin from my pocket.

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The night before the deadline, I made a prototype bonnet and the engine compartment. The bonnet isn’t hinged with what the car industry would call hinges, but with screw-in pegs to save weight, so I unscrewed some bolts from the toilet doors and used them to work out the arc of the bonnet shutline with some 6mm plywood.

I also looked at using hemp instead of fibreglass for the composite bodies, as it was cost effective and stronger in many ways per gram by comparison. But, unfortunately, the fabricators couldn’t make the matting work in some of the tight corners.

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The final result was intended not only to fit into the planned range of cars as a ‘family member’, but also styled to give it a light-hearted feel, with ‘smiley’ shapes in front and rear bumpers and a sunflower shape embossed around the fuel filler.

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Reliant went on to sell over 500 of the mk.3 Robin from its launch in 1999 to the company’s demise in 2001. Today, around 350 exist, but this is dwindling due to accidents and their popularity in banger racing.

As I’ve moved on through the car industry as both a designer and Alias modeller, I look back on that year at Reliant with fondness, as one of those chances of a lifetime that in retrospect were invaluable to my development, and while it seemed raw at the time, it was a very positive experience.

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So, I am writing a book on the design of the Robin and have contributions from the previous designers; Tom Karen for the original Robin and George E Pepall for the Rialto. I need help though, as it remains a mystery as to who facelifted the Rialto to be the mk.2 Robin.

I also need to find a suitable publisher for the book, which not only describes the design of all the Robins, but Reliant’s technical abilities and subsequently aerodynamic testing, modern digital scanning and surfacing of the mk.3, and even rollover tests.

It will be, I hope, like the original Robin: a mixture of good design and a sense of humour.