The Primera Years

The Primera years started with the end of the Morris Itals. It never actually stopped working, which with hindsight seems quite impressive after ten years active service. It had just got to the point when much newer cars suddenly became affordable, although the decision to get rid wasn’t entirely down to economics. Mum had been moaning for ages about how fed up she was with the effort it took to park the thing and to be fair you did need super human strength to manoeuvre it at low speeds. However the real kiss of death for our Ital was her experience behind the wheel of a brand new Saab 9000 Turbo, borrowed off my dads boss whilst he went on holiday. The Saab had been immediately requisitioned for the school run and dad wasn’t back in the drivers seat until the following Monday when he got to drive it back to work. Thanks goes to Neil from RBS Croydon, who was blissfully unaware his company car was used as a taxi service for one week back in 1994. Climbing back into the Ital after getting used to all that Swedish sophistication was a genuine shock for all concerned and it had mum and dad hurrying down to Wilson's in Epsom to marvel over what the world of motor car manufacturing had produced in the decade since their last major car purchase. It wasn’t long before a fine Nissan Primera was selected.

We thought it beautiful. A maroon, four door hatchback, two litre, 16 valve automatic had entered our lives. What a car and what a motoring revelation. These days a high degree of reliability is not just expected, it is assumed. Compared to the Morris Ital and its ancient engine technology the Primera seemed to be powered by something beyond mere internal combustion. Not until its immobiliser started playing up in 2002 did it once fail to start first time. It felt so futuristic to sit in too, the wonders of injection moulding gave the Primera a snug, textured interior in grey and black plastic, the dash integrating into the doors. We revelled in the warming fuzzy material of the seats which felt so luxurious compared to the Itals cold vinyl. Add to this the electric windows in the front, a tape player that actually worked and a heater that could defrost the car even when buried in a snow drift and we were smitten.

It was the family workhorse that ferried us all over the country for eight years and it did us proud. We never went abroad on holiday as my younger brother had terrible asthma as a child and needed to be within a short drive of an A&E. Mum also had claustrophobia, so planes were out of the question, plus we had sod all cash. So during our teenage years we mainly went camping and this brings me to the most amazing facet of the Primera. I challenge anyone to produce a car that in relation to its external dimensions, has more internal luggage space. It is quite extraordinary what you can fit in a Primera and we had no trouble fitting all kinds of camping equipment into its cavernous boot. If you don't believe me, buy one off eBay and see if you can’t fit everything you own into the back of one, especially with the back seats down. Mums Primera lasted until late 2002. We took H678 FBB back to Wilson's to trade her in for a newer Nissan due to the intermittent immobiliser fault. Mum was most put out when they would only offer £500 for her in part exchange and on asking why so little, they tried as tactfully as possible to suggest that with 196,000 miles on the clock, they considered it a reasonably high mileage vehicle. The visual assessment was equally as damning, revealing at least one dent in every panel, the cost of rectification they said, outweighed the value of the car.

When I met my wife years later, she also drove a Primera. A 1.6 litre manual in black, with Nissan alloy wheels and a big noisy exhaust. It was a Primera with a very different character to my family car and yet my wife and I loved it until the day we blew its head gasket coming off the M61. Being my wife's first car, she felt the need to personalise and 'upgrade' the interior, which of course meant adorning it with animal print seat covers and massive pink fluffy cushions, all of dubious taste. At the time we could only afford to run one car and 'Princess' (that was our black Primera, not my wife) was what we used for the daily commute. I was briefly the shipping manager of a commercial importer in Cheatham Hill, Manchester and I remember with a mixture of embarrassment and pride my first day. Arriving late I had to drive past the warehouse lads, who were outside having a smoke. Princess, with her pink cushions and zany cow print seats were in full view. It’s fair to say they laughed their socks off and as a result I was shown very little respect from them during my time there. I didn’t mind as it was a fabulous car to drive, the stubby gear stick with its short throw produced satisfying gear changes and it handled beautifully. It also accelerated off the line very swiftly, but only nought to thirty. Anything of greater speed took an age, which was perfect for my wife, who loved driving fast but who was a rubbish driver at the time. Princess ended her days banger racing. We found out that she lasted just the one corner, being shunted from behind and on losing control received a terminal crunch into the tire wall.

To the original Nissan Primera then, a quietly British built car introduced in 1990. Despite denting very easily, it was in my opinion, streets ahead of the competition in terms of price, reliability and practicality. Ford took another three years to launch their Mondeo and that was more expensive, far less fun to drive and had far less internal space. Writing this has made me want to get another Primera. Maybe I will. So what is next you may ask? Before I get started on some of the other cars in my life, my next couple of blog posts will be on the nature of the classic car obsession itself and some of the consequences involved in its pursuit.

Adolescent Ital

Vivid, block colours on cars are perennially inflicted upon us by most car makers. The Italians seem particularly at ease with dousing anything from their outlandish Lamborghini Murcielago, to their chic Fiat 500 with paints described as ‘Fluorescent Green’ or ‘Tropicalia Yellow.’ In Great Britain, such gregarious displays of colour are now mainly confined to cars like the Ford Focus ST (btw how would Ford badge an ST Diesel variant?) which of course is available in, among other questionable colours, ‘Electric Orange’. Irresponsible use of colour peaked; it seems for us British, during the 1970’s. British Leyland were splashing all kinds of nonsense across our motor cars and seemingly no hue was spared the spray booth; giving us mimosa yellow, blaze orange and even cosmic blue. But whatever happened to the vinyl covered roof? No dubious paint option of the era was ever complete without a resplendent piece of mottled vinyl to cap it off. Examples of this practice include Triumph’s Dolomite Sprint and Jaguar’s XJ Coupes. I’ve never thought of vinyl as an engineering or even cosmetic necessity on the exterior of a car, since the vinyl is stuck to a roof that is already doing quite a good job of covering the top side of the vehicle. However, I’ve read that Jaguar used it on their XJ Coupe’s to cover rough weld markings, but that sounds rather suspect to me. More likely they thought it looked stylish, but as with any fashion device, perspective can be a harsh critic and I imagine people now either love or loath their vinyl roofs, but it still doesn’t explain their permanent extinction...or does it?

Style over substance, vinyl roofs and garish colours leads me straight into my next car, of which I was a passive occupant for nearly a decade. A 1981 Morris Ital. It looked as though it had been dipped in cheap custard, before having a black bin liner steam transferred to its upper portions. Friends, relatives and sometimes complete strangers would often remark on our whereabouts weeks after the event, so conspicuous was our ride. And it wasn’t just the looks (if anyone has a photo of one in yellow with vinyl roof I would love to see it), it also had a droning engine / exhaust note that was quite unlike anything else I’ve ever heard, possibly because even by 1984, the technology was so outdated, there was nothing left on the roads to compare it to.

The most memorable event in our Ital, was a collision with one of those shiny milk lorries on our way to Pevensey Bay in 1985. Approaching a Give Way junction that admittedly looked like a roundabout, my dad mistakenly thought it was his right of way. He was wrong. Ignoring the oncoming tanker and continuing on, the Morris Ital suffered the indignity of being rammed in the front passenger door at some speed. I remember the tubby milkman jumping from his cab with remarkable deftness and being very nice to us all in the aftermath. The Ital took the punishment like the tank it was and only needed a new front door and a bit of paint. It didn’t even stop us from continuing our journey to the campsite and apart from being a little shook up and a few tears out of my younger brother, we were all fine.

My parents had chosen a school virtually outside our catchment area, so the 4.5 miles to ‘middle school’ were undertaken in the Ital, I don’t think there were any direct busses, suffice to say that none of my class mates had ever heard of the village I was from. Mum with two other mums with children spilt the school run. We had the worst car by some margin (the other two cars were a mark 2 XR2 and a Mazda 626). It didn’t help that one of the other kids we drove to school with thought he knew everything worth knowing about cars, as his dad was involved in some form of motor sport and always drove around in a brand new Vauxhall Senator. This lad was constantly telling us how shit our car was and how his dad could perform high speed handbrake turns; this claim seemed particularly enviable at the time. By the late 1980’s I would exit the school gates cringing at the sight of the Ital and wishing that at the very least, it could have been painted in something less yellow, which is so typical of an adolescents ungratefulness isn’t it. My Dads cars have always been worse than my mums and his two car purchases during the late eighties didn’t help matters. They were (in order) a mark 1 Vauxhall Cavalier, which had the most pristine bodywork but died of terminal engine failure in a matter of months and its replacement, a Datsun cherry estate, which lasted a couple more years. The Datsun had the most amazingly sweet engine, but the bodywork of a Lada bathed in acid. Its colour? Yellow, but only where it wasn’t brown and flaky from the rust. It failed its MOT test when the tester could put his hand through one of the holes in the bodywork. To this day that car is my dads personal favourite.

Briefly back to the Ital then, a car which holds many happy memories that doesn’t include why or exactly when we got rid of it. Perhaps I have blocked it out as a painful recollection. Or maybe it’s because the memory of the day we got our next car is emblazoned. Our Nissan Primera ushered our family into the truly modern age of motoring, the car and its magnificence I will explain in a later blog. In comparison to the Ital it felt like taking a ride in an alien spaceship and it comes as little surprise that the Morris Ital was voted the second worst British car ever in a poll in 2008. Some cars are ahead of their time and some cars are just behind it.