Once out and about on the busy UK roads on yet another typical damp and dreary day in November, the unusual events of the day continued. I soon spotted a rarely seen Reliant Rebel travelling in the opposite direction – one of only 2,600 examples of this would-be Mini-rivalling plastic four-wheeler made over a ten-year period from 1964, with just a declining 26 now still registered and in use on our roads, according to the sometimes questionably inaccurate How Many Left? (HML) website.
Had I still been a small kid, travelling in the back of one of my dad’s many Reliant Scimitar GTEs, I probably would have earned a healthy 25 points for spotting a Rebel in my old and well-thumbed i-Spy book of cars.
Following that initial surprise, virtually at every turn thereafter I seemed to spot an endless parade of rare and unusual cars braving the less-than-ideal British winter road conditions. A scarce but un-noteworthy Proton Impian, an instantly forgettable Malaysian mid-sized family saloon, mostly used as an affordable but anonymous mini cab found loitering outside railway stations a few years ago. Again, according to the HML site, a surprisingly high 37 Impians (down from 561 a decade earlier) are still pounding the King’s highways, more than I would have expected, as I’ve not seen one of these drab saloons for quite a while. I’m not sure how many points a Proton Impian would attract in an i-Spy book, but it would deserve to be quite a few I’d imagine due to its rarity, not only now, but also when current and new.