THE MIDDLE GROUND

Never has a car been quite so unfairly maligned as the Reliant Robin. The butt of innumerable jokes down the pub and lampooned with such glee on TV, many people can’t even get the name right – you’ll often hear it referred to as a Robin Reliant, and many people carelessly use the Robin name to refer to any Reliant with three wheels. Yet Reliant and its three-wheeled creations deserve far more respect than this – respect for the design ingenuity, the production skills and the way they helped bring motoring pleasure to many thousands of happy customers who might otherwise never have bought a car.

Not that buying a Reliant three-wheeler was an option of last resort, because many loyal customers would never have considered anything else. It cannot be denied, however, that a Reliant three-wheeler is a somewhat eccentric choice, nor that legislative quirks and financial inducements did not play a part in some buying decisions. So let’s take a look at how the Robin came about, a story which will of necessity be something of a whirlwind tour because it starts with the Motor Department of the Raleigh Cycle Company all the way back in 1930 when an engineer called Tom Lawrence Williams