It's taken 40 years but the Leyland P76 has finally shaken off its ''lemon'' label, Canberra car owner and former motoring writer Col Gardner says.
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He and his wife Bernice took over her late father's near-mint Targa Florio model in 1995 and say they always only ever get positive comments when they take it out for a spin.
''People will come up to you and say 'if only they'd kept making them','' Mr Gardner said.
''It was the collapse of Leyland Australia that killed the P76, not the other way around. The car's death warrant was signed in England before it had a chance to prove itself here.''
Mr Gardner said this weekend's celebrations to mark the launch of the car in Canberra on June 26, 1973, vindicated a significantly underrated Australian car.
''Four decades have passed and people still feel an emotional connection with these vehicles, appreciate their heritage and are working to ensure they are preserved,'' he said.
More than 150 Leyland owners are set to converge on Canberra for two days of activities this weekend and between 75 and 100 P76s and P76 derivatives are to be on display at the Old Parliament House Gardens on Sunday.
However Mr Gardner does not believe the P76 would have had a long production life, regardless of how good it had been.
''Leyland Australia had been marginal for years; Leyland had terrible problems in the UK and the decision to close the Australian factory was made in February 1974, only eight months after the P76 went on the market,'' he said.
That decision was a close-held secret and Leyland Australia staff were already hard at work on an updated model when they learnt the plant was to close eight months later.
''There were teething problems but they were no worse than those affecting the new Holden and Falcon and the engineers were working to fix them,'' he said. ''[P76] issues included water leaks and poor panel fit.''
He cites Ford's Cortina, which survived in various guises into the 1980s, as probably the worst Australian lemon of the era. It was plagued with major assembly faults, water and dust leaks and reliability issues. On one famous occasion a dashboard actually fell into a magazine road tester's lap while he was driving the car he had just picked up out of Ford Australia's car park.
''Ultimately it was the economics of the industry that were going to take the P76 out,'' Mr Gardner said. ''The only way the P76 could have survived was if it had knocked off one of the existing big three in the market - the Valiant, Holden or Falcon.''
His views echo a newspaper headline written before Leyland closed down in 1974. It stated ''Four into 300,000 won't go''. Only 450,000 new cars were registered in 1973. About a third were imports.
The 300,000 cars remaining were not a big enough market to support four major local manufacturers.
The Valiant struggled through the 1970s and production ended in 1981. Its successor, Mitsubishi, stopped making cars here in 2008. Ford is to cease production next year. Nissan, which had started local production in the 1970s and manufactured 200Bs, Bluebirds, Pulsars, Pintaras and Skylines in Melbourne, shut down in 1992.
