Legend or Lemon? Our verdict on the world’s most controversial cars

It’s also true that people rarely have a universally agreed opinion about the same thing. For example, every car ever made has its supporters and its detractors.

Joyfully ignoring the problems this can lead to, we’ve picked 40 cars, arranged them in alphabetical order and put forward our view on whether each one was a legend or a lemon. In cases where we can’t decide, we’ve called a tie.

Individual opinions don’t really matter, of course, so if you happen to disagree with ours, we can still be friends.

Legend: The Pacer was cleverly designed, notably when it came to safety, an area far less widely considered in the 1970s than it is today. Despite being short by US standards of the time, it was also impressively wide, in an effort to avoid making Americans feel they were cramped in a compact car. And the windows were very large, so it was easy to see out of and park.

Lemon: While its dimensions made sense if you were sitting inside, they also made the Pacer look very strange. Furthermore, the plentiful supply of glass made it heavy. It also didn’t translate well in other markets, where journalists usually reported that it was awful to drive. And despite being small, it was remarkably thirsty.

Final verdict: Lemon

Legend: In an attempt to reduce the average fuel consumption and CO2 emissions across its range, Aston Martin created the Cygnet by restyling and adding luxury elements to the Toyota iQ. So far, so good. The iQ might not have been Toyota’s most successful model, but it was a perfectly acceptable city car.

Lemon: The problem with the Cygnet was that, at its launch in 2011, it had a base price of £30,995 (around £48,000 in 2023 money), and you could pay far more than that if you played fast and loose with the options list. There was talk of selling 4000 annually, but as things turned out only a few hundred people were ever prepared to spend so much on a small car with a fancy badge – though its rarity does at least mean they’re still quite valuable.

Final verdict: Lemon

Legend: On paper, the Allegro was a significant car for its time. It had front-wheel drive (with which British Leyland was already very familiar, though it was still uncommon on mainstream European cars in the early 1970s) and it was the first model ever fitted with the Hydragas suspension system.

Lemon: As originally designed by Harris Mann (born 1938), the Allegro was low and sleek. BL then decided that the more powerful versions should be powered by its E-Series engine, which was very tall. The resulting styling compromise made the Allegro look dumpy. It was also no roomier than the 1100/1300 it replaced, it wasn’t a hatchback (which it should have been) and early press reports were critical. Despite two major updates, it never sold well.

Final verdict: Lemon

Legend: Brilliantly packaged, and with an innovative suspension system which included rubber cones, the Mini was three things at once: simple, economical daily transport, a formidable competition car and at least as popular among A-list celebrities as the Toyota Prius and Cadillac Escalade would later become.

Lemon: Despite its huge success, the Mini is believed to have been unprofitable for its maker, at least in the early days. Its 41-year lifespan made very little sense – by the time production ended in 2000, it was at least two decades out of date, though many people still loved it.

Final verdict: Legend

Legend: The Allanté was a smart-looking luxury two-seat roadster designed by Pininfarina. In its seven-year run, it went through many changes, perhaps the most significant being the fitment of the 4.6-litre Northstar V8 engine in 1993, the car’s last and (perhaps not coincidentally) most successful year.

Lemon: The Allanté was built on what has been described as “the world’s longest assembly line”. Its body was built by Pininfarina in Turin and then flown across the Atlantic to Detroit, where final assembly took place. This very expensive process led to a base price, in 1987, of $54,700. No matter how good the car looked, almost nobody thought it was worth anything like that much.

Final verdict: Lemon

Legend: The third-generation Camaro was a pleasantly aggressive-looking sports car which remained in production for a full decade from 1982. When fitted with either V6 or larger, more powerful V8 engines – the latter fitted to, for example, the Z28 (pictured) – it was generally well received. But there was another engine which was widely reviled, and cast a shadow over the Camaro name.

Lemon: No Camaro was ever called the Iron Duke. That name was in fact applied to a 2.5-litre four-cylinder engine designed by fellow General Motors brand Pontiac, and used in the entry-level Camaro from 1982 to 1986. Even in its most powerful form, it couldn’t quite muster 100bhp, and frankly it had no business being anywhere near a car like this.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: Unlike any other mainstream American car, the Corvair had a rear-mounted, air-cooled, flat-six engine, and in that respect was very similar to the Porsche 911. In addition to this daring layout, it had very influential styling – several smaller European cars of the 1960s looked like pocket-sized versions of the Corvair. And despite problems related below, it shifted 1.8 million examples in total.

Lemon: The swing-axle rear suspension of the first-generation Corvair was a bad match for the rear-heavy weight distribution. The car was slammed by Ralph Nader in his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed. A later investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that it wasn’t as bad as Nader said it was. In any case, by the time the book was published the second-generation Corvair was already on sale, with completely different rear suspension which improved it greatly. However, sales never recovered after the Corvair had become, rather unfairly, the poster child for unsafe American cars.

Verdict: Tie

Legend: Since it has been building them for 70 years, it’s safe to say that Chevrolet knows what it’s doing with the Corvette. The first-generation model was striking to look at, and also radical. It was among the earliest American cars – and certainly the first produced by a mainstream manufacturer – to feature a fibreglass body. These 1950s Corvettes are highly prized today, and no wonder.

Lemon: Oddly, from a 21st-century perspective, the Corvette was not considered a great car at first. The fact that it started out with a solid axle rather than independent rear suspension didn’t help, but of more concern was the fact that the only available engine was the old Stovebolt straight-six – a fine engine in itself, but not ideal for a sporting model. When the new smallblock V8 was introduced for the 1955 model year, the Corvette became the car it should have been from the start, and sales began to soar.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: The Airflow was a startling machine for any manufacturer to produce as early as 1934. It had unibody construction, which made it stronger for its weight than a car built by the traditional body-on-frame method, and it was more streamlined than anything its potential owners had had the opportunity to buy in the past.

Lemon: If you ever need an example of a car which was too modern for its own good, the Airflow will do nicely. It looked so shocking that most buyers went elsewhere. Production was halted in 1937, a year after the almost identical but cheaper DeSoto version was abandoned. Chrysler had made a brilliant car, but had failed to realise that its radical appearance would chase people away.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: Using the rather ordinary Neon as a starting point, Chrysler created the retro-styled PT Cruiser, which slightly resembled a 1930s saloon. At its launch in 2000, it seemed fun, and thanks to its high roofline it had an impressive amount of headroom.

Lemon: By the time the Cruiser was discontinued in 2010, potential buyers had had enough of it. Safety organisations on both sides of the Atlantic weren’t impressed either, giving the car low marks in several areas. The drop-top version, known as the PT Cabrio, came in for particular criticism, its scuttle-shake once being compared with that of a 1960 Morris Minor convertible.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: Quite apart from the fact that it featured in the Back to the Future film series, the DeLorean had all the makings of an exciting sports car, with a stainless steel body designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro (born 1938), a rear-mounted V6 engine and substantial engineering input from Lotus. What, as they say, could possibly go wrong?

Lemon: Well, for a start, the DeLorean company could collapse horribly, as indeed it did. Before that happened, though, it was already clear that the Peugeot-Renault-Volvo engine didn’t provide as much performance as the car’s appearance suggested it should, and that there were serious quality problems.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: Named after an extremely odd-looking derivative of the much older Fiat 600, the Multipla was one of the most imaginative, and at the same time controversial, compact MPVs ever devised. Like its namesake, it was a six-seater, but this time the seats were arranged in two rows of three (a very sociable layout, since everyone on board was within touching distance of everyone else). For a car of this type, it was also pretty good to drive.

Lemon: In its original form, sold from 1998, the Multipla looked extraordinary, resembling (it was later said) a psychotic cartoon duck. You certainly couldn’t mistake it for anything else. Some people liked it, but most didn’t. Fiat responded to the majority view and dramatically toned down the design in 2004, which was perhaps a pity.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: The European Escort was the most-registered car in the UK for most of the 1990s. After a brief interruption by the Ford Fiesta, the fifth-generation model took over the same position, leading the charts from 1992 to 1994. Clearly, Ford was doing something right.

Lemon: In fact, Ford was doing a lot wrong with this car, at least to begin with. Despite its popularity, it was criticised for its dull appearance, uninspiring dynamics and ageing engines. In late 1992, a revised Escort was introduced with a facelift, improved suspension, the new Zetec engine range, more equipment and more competitive pricing, which turned it into the car it should have been two years before - but our verdict is on the car as it originally arrived.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: The Mustang nameplate in general is a motoring legend, having been used constantly since 1964. Several engines have been available over the years, but the one that suits the car best is a V8. The only motor of this type offered in the Mustang in the early 1980s was the 255, a 4.2-litre unit from the Windsor family, which itself had a proud history. What wasn’t to like?

Lemon: The problem with the 255 was that it was smothered in order to meet fuel economy targets. A side-effect of this was that it produced only around 120bhp, and that just wasn’t enough for a rumbling American V8, especially one fitted to a sporting model. Ford removed it from the range and reintroduced the considerably more powerful 4.9-litre Windsor instead.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: Until the Fiesta came along, the Pinto sub-compact was the smallest Ford offered in North America during the 1970s. It was also immensely popular, topping the US charts in 1974. For reasons which will soon become apparent, sales dropped sharply after that, but Ford was still able to build over 180,000 annually in the car’s last three model years, from 1978 to 1980.

Lemon: At the height of its popularity, the Pinto became extremely controversial due to a tendency to burst into flames in a rear-end impact. Arguments about this raged for many years, but the upshot was that the reputation of a generally successful car was irretrievably ruined.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: Hillman’s smallest car was a brilliant rival to the Mini. Its outstanding feature was a rear-mounted, all-alloy, overhead camshaft engine designed by Coventry Climax and capable of immense power outputs when tuned for competition.

Lemon: In one sense, the engine was also a liability. If allowed to overheat, it could fail spectacularly, which had a serious impact on the Imp’s reputation. The secret, logically enough, was to make sure it didn’t become too hot – even racing versions are usually reliable as long as they are kept within normal operating temperatures.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: General Motors described the H3 as “the most accessible Hummer”, and it was certainly the least socially unacceptable model the brand ever produced. It was also reasonably comfortable, had a decent amount of interior space and performed very well off-road.

Lemon: Those delights were offset by alarmingly low fuel economy (even with a relatively modest 3.7-litre five-cylinder engine) and high CO2 emissions, and by the fact that driving on tarmac roads was not a pleasant experience. In the latter respect, the H3 was soundly beaten by the contemporary Range Rover, even though it was shorter, narrower and lower than the British model, which should have worked in its favour.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: In its early days, we called the X-Type ‘the most important Jaguar ever’. Undoubtedly, it allowed the brand to enter new territory. Over the years, the car was available with four-wheel drive, front-wheel drive, a four-cylinder engine (among several V6s), a diesel and an estate body, none of them familiar to previous Jaguar owners. It was also relatively inexpensive. At one point you could buy a new one for just under £20,000.

Lemon: Most of the above was possible because the X-Type was related to the Ford Mondeo. This inspired derisive comments from people who should have known better – platform sharing wasn’t exactly new in the early 2000s. More seriously, development began to stall. Sales, never impressive, fell away, and Jaguar abandoned the project after eight years without creating an immediate successor. What had once seemed like a great opportunity came, in the end, to very little.

Verdict: Tie

Legend: The cars now known collectively as Lada Classic were all derived from the Fiat 124, though with revisions to make them suitable for Russian road conditions. The Classic was very popular on its home market, and found an impressive number of buyers in parts of western Europe (particularly Scotland) who wanted a cheap new car and didn’t care what anyone else thought about it.

Lemon: For many years, it was almost guaranteed that you would get a laugh simply by telling a joke, no matter how weak, as long as it had the word ‘Lada’ in it. By western standards, it wasn’t a good car and very hard-going to drive, but that didn’t matter. It did the job it was intended to do, and remained in production for nearly two decades.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: The Beta was the first model released by Lancia after it was taken over by Fiat in 1969. It was powered by a development of the celebrated Fiat Twin Cam engine, available in capacities from 1.3 to 2.0 litres, and featured fully independent suspension, all-round disc brakes and front-wheel drive. Body styles included a fastback, a coupe, a roadster and a sleek estate.

Lemon: Early in its life, the Beta developed a terrible reputation for rust. Lancia was eventually able to address the problem, but by then the brand was so damaged in the UK that it had to be withdrawn from the market, never to return. For this to be caused by an otherwise excellent car was a great pity.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: The original Land Rover was introduced as just another model in the Rover range in 1948, was renamed Defender in 1990 and remained in production until 2016. On rough ground, it was phenomenal, and its name became shorthand for ‘off-roader’ in the same way that ‘Jeep’ sometimes is too. Relaunched in 2019, the latest Defender is a strong seller.

Lemon: Long before production finally came to an end, the Land Rover was decades behind the times, and only slightly more refined than it had been shortly after the Second World War. Its off-road ability was never in question, but driving it on tarmac was not a pleasant experience.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: MG did not launch a proper post-War car until 1955, relying for a decade on earlier designs or, in the case of the Z-Type Magnette, a Wolseley design and an Austin engine, which did not impress enthusiasts of the marque in the slightest. The MGA, when it finally arrived, was a revelation. It was so highly regarded that MG was able to sell more than 100,000 examples, knocking its previous record out of the park.

Lemon: In 1958, MG introduced a performance derivative of the MGA with a twin-cam version of the B-Series engine with, for the time, a very high compression ratio. It performed very well in races and rallies, but on the fuel available to everyday drivers it was hopelessly unreliable. MG gave up on it in 1960, and it accounted for slightly less than two percent of total MGA production.

Verdict: Depends on the engine

Legend: The MGC was a variant of the MGB, a roadster (or, if called MGB GT, a coupe) which had a long production life from 1962 to 1980. It was the first MG to achieve sales in excess of half a million, and the 3.5-litre MGB GT V8 is regarded particularly highly, though only 2591 were built.

Lemon: The GT V8 wasn’t the first attempt at a high-performance B. MG tried it in 1967, putting a three-litre six-cylinder engine in the B and calling the result MGC. The engine was heavy, which caused handling problems, and while it was powerful at high revs it didn’t have much power lower down the range. The model was discontinued after two years, to the regret of hardly anyone, though we should perhaps mention that the then Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) quite liked his.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: Fashionable though it may now be to denigrate the Marina, it wasn’t exactly catastrophic in its day. Over a million were sold around the world, and in the early to mid 1970s it was one of the most successful cars of any type in the UK.

Lemon: But yes, okay, it wasn’t great. It was designed in a rush, using already outdated technology, and by the end of its life there was very little to be said in its favour.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: Closely related to the contemporary Nissan Micra and Renault Clio, the third-generation Cube was the first to be sold outside Japan, and if you liked quirkiness it was definitely something to consider buying. Nissan’s marketing people emphasised its form over its function, a tactic which had already worked very well for the retro-styled Fiat 500 and Volkswagen Beetle.

Lemon: Cute though it may have been, the Cube had problems. The sun visors and the controls for the headlights and door mirrors were difficult to reach, and a claim that the car had ‘perfect’ visibility was demonstrable nonsense. The car’s wind-resisting shape had a disastrous effect on fuel economy and CO2 emissions. It was abandoned in Europe very quickly, and somewhat later in the US, due to poor sales, though in the former case Nissan tried to blame an unfavourable exchange rate between the Euro and the Yen.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: The P50 is generally accepted to be the smallest car ever to have gone into production, and one of the very few built on the Isle of Man. It’s celebrated mostly for the first of these facts, which makes it an object of fascination and delight.

Lemon: Looked at critically, the P50 was noisy, slow and smelly, and had to be manoeuvred by hand in the tightest spaces because it had no reverse gear. Driving it along a city street in the company of lorries, buses and normal-sized cars – or really anything heavier than a bicycle – could be considered perilous. But most of this could be said of other micro cars too.

Verdict: Tie

Legend: Without question, the 1007 was an ingenious car. Shorter than the 206 it was based on, it was nevertheless a practical little MPV, with the outstanding feature of a pair of sliding doors. The doors were powered, but were designed to stop closing automatically if they sensed an obstruction, such as someone’s arm.

Lemon: In practice, the doors didn’t always stop closing when they were meant to, which could be very painful to the owner of the arm in question. The 1007 was also expensive, and its front seatbelts were mounted so far back that they were difficult to reach even for tall drivers, and significantly more so for shorter ones. There were also grim tales of what could happen if you jacked up the car to change a wheel without shutting the doors first – and those doors also made it very heavy for its size.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: The Prowler was perhaps the most radical of the retro-styled cars produced by Chrysler around the turn of the century. It was designed to look like a 1930s style hot rod (though those never ended up the same way they came out of the factory) and it was remarkably light at 1290kg.

Lemon: The Prowler has been criticised for having a 3.5-litre V6 engine rather than a more hot-roddish big V8. In fact, the V6 gave decent performance, especially after it was upgraded to produce 253bhp for the 1999 model year. Complaints about poor visibility and almost zero practicality were valid, but they missed the point of the car.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: In every respect but one, the Aztek is remembered as a roomy, practical, mid-size crossover SUV that in many ways was a harbinger of the soft-roaders that are an everyday sight on America’s roads today. It had a job to do, and it did it. No problem. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Lemon: Yes, but look at it. The Fiat Multipla might have been weird, but the Aztek was almost frightening. It can’t be a coincidence that it was thrashed in the marketplace by its corporate cousin, the mechanically identical but much less ugly Buick Rendezvous, which found more buyers in its second worst year than the Aztek did in its best. And, while it’s difficult to blame the fall of a brand on a single model, we might note that Pontiac had survived for 74 years before the Aztek came along, and lasted for only three after it was discontinued.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: The Fiero was an unusually exciting type of car for ‘80s Pontiac to produce – a mid-engined two-seater with a spaceframe chassis and plastic body panels. Okay, one of the available engines was the unloved 2.5-litre Iron Duke, but a 2.8-litre V6 was added to the range in the second model year, and a much larger V8 would fit if you happened to have one.

Lemon: Intriguing though it appeared to be, the Fiero was harmed by a low development budget, lack of pace and handling, increasing competition from imported sports cars and an early tendency to go on fire shortly after the engine blew up. Sales, initially very strong, soon collapsed, and Pontiac abandoned the car after just five model years.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: Reliant was exceptionally good both at designing three-wheelers and at making fibreglass bodies. The Robin was possibly the most famous example of these areas of expertise being combined. In no way an exciting car, it was nevertheless cheap, economical and practical. Reliant produced it from 1973 to 1981, then brought it back for two more generations from 1989 to 2001, and you can’t do that if your customers don’t like what you’re building.

Lemon: A car with one wheel at the front and two at the rear, as the Robin did, is less stable than one with the opposite arrangement. Most of us have seen footage of Robins going rubber side up, but in fact they were far less likely to do this than you might believe.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: No other car epitomised Renault’s daring design philosophy at the turn of the century quite like the Avantime. Developed and manufactured by Matra, it was a combination of a luxury car, a coupe and an MPV, and it looked quite unlike anything on sale at the time.

Lemon: Lots of people talked about the Avantime when it was introduced in 2001, but over the next two years fewer than 9000 of them actually bought it. Sales were so bad that Matra decided it had had enough of the automotive business, and moved on to other things. Renault, which had been responsible for the car’s unusual experience, could conceivably have continued production on its own, but decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: With the Dauphine, Renault created something close to the perfect small European car for the 1950s. Immensely popular in France, it also found favour in many other countries (often being built locally) and particularly in the US, where it was an immediate hit. Renault’s market share in North America skyrocketed, and the company was able to build four million units in just four years, demolishing its previous production record.

Lemon: The US success did not last for long. Dauphines quickly developed a reputation for rust, and they did not cope well with the mileages that American owners expected to be able to cover. Sales, and therefore income, collapsed in the region, bringing Renault close to bankruptcy, though the car remained so popular elsewhere that Renault was able to persevere it until 1967.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: After a long period of turbulence, Rover came up with what should have been a winner with the 75. Although it was criticised in some quarters for its retro styling, it was clearly a beautifully-engineered, high-quality car, and immediately inspired positive reviews in the motoring press. During its lifetime, when several new variants were introduced, nothing happened to dispel this early impression.

Lemon: During the official unveiling in October 1998, Bernd Pischetsrieder (born 1948) – then head of BMW, which owned Rover at the time – did almost nothing to promote the car, but instead complained about productivity issues and lack of UK government support. A huge promotional opportunity had been squandered, but Pischetsrieder had a point, and both Rover and Pischetsrieder were gone from BMW within 18 months. The car died, not because of its own failings, but because the now independent firm collapsed in 2005, taking what might have been Rover’s best ever model with it.

Verdict: Legend

Legend: The SD1 single-handedly eliminated the old ‘auntie Rover’ jibe. For a mainstream model introduced in 1976 it looked extraordinary – not unlike the slightly older Ferrari Daytona. Under the skin it was more conventional than it appeared, but the well-established 3.5-litre V8 engine was exactly the right choice for the car.

Lemon: Production was interrupted several times in the early days by strike action resulting from conflicts between the management and workforce. Another problem was that the SD1 quickly became known for being poorly built. As a result of these and other matters, it was never as successful as it should have been. It was still a memorable car, but it could have been so much better.

Verdict: Tie

Legend: The Rodius was an enormous MPV with seven seats, and a load volume of more than 3000 litres if only the front two were left standing. Its practicality was beyond question, and you could have it for about the price of a high-end Ford Fiesta if you stuck to the bottom of the range.

Lemon: For such little cost, you couldn’t expect refinement, high-quality plastics or much in the way of safety equipment, and indeed you didn’t get it. Most criticism of the Rodius, however, was directed towards its bizarre appearance. British designer Ken Greenley, who was responsible for this, said that it made sense in the car’s home country of South Korea, though most observers agreed that it made none at all in his own. A 2008 facelift, performed four years after the model’s introduction, didn’t help much, but for people who needed a vehicle which was both very roomy and very cheap the looks hardly mattered.

Verdict: Tie

Legend: Subaru was inspired by the Japanese kei car regulations to create the tiny, rear-engined, two-stroke 360, which went on sale in 1958 and was popular enough to be kept on the market until 1971. The word ‘legend’ should be used cautiously here, but it’s fair to say that the 360 was a big success in its home country.

Lemon: It’s also, we suggest, fair to say that, in the very different context of US motoring, the 360 would have earned a Nobel prize, an Olympic gold medal and elevation to sainthood if the governing bodies concerned had included categories for lemons. Even the importer felt compelled to advertise the car as ‘cheap and ugly’. One memorable review criticised everything about it, and included the resounding sentence, “It was a pleasure to squirm out of the Subaru, slam the door and walk away.”

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: The 601 was the third, the longest-lived and the best-known Trabant, and remained in production all the way from the early 1960s (when it was not entirely out-of-date) to 1990 (when it was a survivor of an earlier, darker age). It was one of the few cars an ordinary resident of Communist-controlled East Germany could afford to buy, and because it was so simple it was relatively easy to fix if it went wrong.

Lemon: Be that as it may, the ‘Trabbi’ was an awful car by the standards of at least its last two decades, and not even worth comparing with, say, the Volkswagen Polo produced at the same time across the western border.

Verdict: Lemon

Legend: With the help of designer Giovanni Michelotti (1921-1980), Triumph produced some beautiful cars in the 1970s. Even today, more than half a century after it was launched, the Stag looks beautiful, and it was powered by a fruity 3.0-litre V8 engine, which must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Lemon: The problem was that the engine was disastrously unreliable. One former employee of a Triumph dealership tells us that if someone came in to complain of engine trouble, he would have to explain to the crestfallen owner before the conversation went any further that the repair cost might be more than half the purchase price of the car. Only the fact that carefully rebuilt and maintained units have been reported to provide trouble-free motoring in recent years prevents us from describing the Stag as irretrievably lemonish.

Verdict: Tie

Legend: With sales of over 100,000, the TR7 was by far the most successful of all the Triumph TR sports cars. Most versions had four-cylinder engines, but some (sold only in North America, and known as the TR8) were powered by the 3.5-litre Rover V8 engine, which was regarded as an ideal match.

Lemon: Even in an age of wedge-shaped cars, the TR7 looked remarkable, though the design did nothing to help visibility in an age when buyers expected manufacturers to build cars they could see out of. Slow development, quality issues and industrial action further eroded the car’s potential as a legend. It was also the last Triumph designed in-house (the slightly later Acclaim was a mildly reworked Honda Ballade, a Civic with a boot). If the TR7 had been better than it was, for all sorts of reasons, Triumph might have survived for many years longer.

Verdict: Lemon