NSFW advisory for language.

I’ve been playing a lot of Forza Horizon 4 over the past few weeks (thank you, Xbox Game Pass for PC!), and while I absolutely love it, I’m a bit disappointed that Playground Games didn’t include more Reliant cars. There’s one in the game: the Reliant Regal Supervan III from 1972, which will be familiar to fans of Only Fools and Horses and Mr Bean. Dad had one, not long after I was born. Obviously, I don’t remember actually experiencing the ride in it, but I’ve seen it in pictures: light blue, with a huge Mickey Mouse decal on the bonnet. In a sort of tribute to Dad’s vehicle, I chose light blue as the bodywork colour for the one I bought in the game.

What I’m more familiar with are the later “Plastic Pigs”, aka the Reliant Robin – *record scratch*

OK, before I go any further, let’s clear something up; a pet peeve of mine. For reasons utterly unknown to me, the Robin is incessantly referred to as a “Robin Reliant”. It’s fucking ridiculous – it’d be like saying “Escort Ford” or “Beetle Volkswagen”! It’s a RELIANT ROBIN, people!

Phew. Rant over.

The Reliant Robin, the bane of my formative years.

Dad owned several of these over the years, and even a Reliant Rialto for a while; the Rialtos look, to me, more like plastic K-9s than plastic pigs (the pic on the linked Wikipedia article should give you an idea, there). The reason for Dad driving them was that, at the time, only a motorcycle licence was required to drive one (the tax disc on a Robin would describe the car as a tricycle). But I suspect the reason Dad got through so many was that he was not kind to his vehicles. He’d thrash the hell out of them, so it often seemed as if the car of the moment was broken down for as long as it was actually on the road…

His driving style could probably best be described as “frustrated boy racer”. In terms of obeying the rules of the road, he was generally fine; we only ever suffered one crash, in the late 1970s, and that wasn’t the fault of anyone in our car. But fuck me, it’s like the Robins never went fast enough for him. According to Wikipedia, the Robin is capable of a top speed of 85 mph, but I distinctly recall us travelling at 80 along a motorway, and the entire car was vibrating. Some scary shit, right there.

The reliability issues of the Robins under Dad’s stewardship affected me a lot. And there was a focus for my nervousness, namely the voltmeter. This, along with the oil-pressure meter, was located on the centre console, where it was in full view of everyone.

A voltmeter from the Robin; always met with fevered scrutiny from my anxious self.

At some point, I’d made the connection that if there was a fault with the car, the voltmeter would often fall below 13V. So it eventually reached the point where, if it seemed like there was something amiss with the car, I’d watch the voltmeter like a hawk, and begin getting agitated when it fell below my arbitrarily-assigned cut-off point. My worried complaining when this occurred usually resulted in Dad or Mum telling me to fucking shut up, and rightfully so; an already tense situation is definitely not helped by a little kid, who had no knowledge of mechanics, whining about the car going wrong.

The Robin having only three wheels also posed an issue: one of stability. Let’s be clear: they never rolled, like when the Top Gear team fiddled with the differential of one, and apparently also weighted it on one side. But bumpy country lanes were not friends of the Robins. We would make an annual trip into the countryside around Stainforth to pick blackberries (Mum’s blackberry-and-apple crumbles are blissful), and the trip necessitated driving down a dirt track we referred to as “Blackberry Lane”. Pitted and rutted, it would bounce the car around something chronic, doing nothing for my peace of mind. Not even the prospect of those gorgeous fruit crumbles would assuage my anxiety.

Another trip I used to dread – for just about the same reason – was to Epworth, to visit my Aunt Gwen, Uncle Cyril, and their seemingly homicidal corgis. OK, that’s an exaggeration about the dogs, but this is back when I was scared shitless of canines; something I’m much better at nowadays. The Parkin household was located some way down a country lane; not particularly far, but it was in a condition that was just as abysmal as Blackberry Lane. The visits with Aunt Gwen and Uncle Cyril were pleasant enough (once the maniacal corgis were shut in the hallway passage), but the two trips along that horrible lane were awful. I just had a look on Google Maps, and the road appears to now be paved, though my aunt and uncle have long since passed on, so there’d never be a need to go that way again.

One particularly infamous incident wasn’t entirely Dad’s fault. One Easter Monday, when I was in my early teens (I think), we were on one of our frequent days out to the seaside; Cleethorpes in this case. The M180 motorway had been fairly recently completed, so it gave Dad the chance to bomb it for a good chunk of the way, even faster than he would on A-roads. However, a few minutes after hitting the motorway, the Robin began to stutter when Dad had his foot on the accelerator. It was slight at first, but steadily worsening. Now, I don’t know if I was the first to notice it, but while the voltmeter seemed normal, the engine temperature gauge was rapidly rising from “N” (normal) to “H”. This was something I’d not encountered before in any car, and I was shitting bricks. Dad pulled onto the hard shoulder, and went to examine the radiator. But he didn’t wait to take off the radiator cap, and a high-pressure jet of scalding water shot upwards. Dad was lucky that he wasn’t much in the way when the gusher happened.

A nervous debate occurred as to whether we should risk continuing onwards to Cleethorpes, or get off at the next exit and limp home. Despite my severe reservations, I pointed out that we were more than halfway to the seaside, so it might be better to carry on. (Somewhere in the past, I’d shown some aptitude at reading maps, so I ended up becoming the family’s navigator. As a result, there was usually a road atlas opened on my lap on long journeys, so that was how I was aware of our position.)

We continued. The parlous state of the poor Robin worsened, and I became even more frightened. My focus switched from the voltmeter to the temperature gauge, announcing when it was close to “H”, whereupon we’d stop to let the car cool down for a bit. Accelerating from a standstill was hellish, with the Robin juddering like it was being driven by someone on their first driving lesson. By the time we were maybe three-quarters of the way to Cleethorpes, blue smoke from burning motor oil began coming in through the car’s interior air vents.

Despite the car deteriorating rapidly, we did actually make it to Cleethorpes. We parked up, and while the car cooled down from its traumatic ordeal, we were able to spend a few hours not thinking about whether we were going to make it home, as we enjoyed the planned outing. Fortunately, by the time we cautiously set off back home – I don’t think Dad took the motorway on the way back, but I could be wrong on that – there was a mild headwind, which helped cool the engine. We arrived back at home without suffering much mishap, but I was fucking relieved to get out of that car!

Later, Dad discovered that (if I recall correctly) there was supposed to be a 750cc engine in the Robin (he’d bought it second-hand), but what was actually there was a 700cc Reliant Regal engine, and the bloody thing most likely wouldn’t have been able to cope, even if Dad hadn’t been dishing out his usual pedal-to-the-fibre-glass driving style. To replace the burnt-out engine, Dad ended up replacing it with an 850cc model, and that went like a fucking rocket – at least, until the carburettor started packing in, and the car began to stutter again during acceleration.

Dad did eventually take a driving test to drive four-wheelers, and after passing that, he finally made the switch. This was greatly to my relief, because my anxiety about Robins had reached the point where I felt nauseous every single time I got in one. I don’t know what had caused Dad to want to make the change, but one possible reason is the harrowing time he had with trying to sort out the Robin he’d bought after the “700cc model”. He’d bought it very cheaply (my brain is claiming it was only £40, but this is going back a couple of decades, at least), and he absolutely could not get it to work. I remember seeing the light on in his garage well into the night, where he was desperately trying to get the thing to run, to no avail. Here’s how bad it was: he was in tears about it; until he began to suffer from progressive supranuclear palsy in the 2000s, Dad was not much of a one for betraying vulnerable emotions in public.

Whatever the cause, The Era of the Plastic Pig did, at long last, come to an end, and I was not at all sorry to see the back of it. Still, it’s a bit of a shame that Forza Horizon 4 doesn’t include at least the Robin in their line-up (at least, they don’t as of the time of writing). And it’s actually been fun to drive the Supervan III around (and I have rolled it, often). For a little while, I even installed a tuning set-up which raised the maximum speed from 80mph to around 150mph. That was a fucking trip, I can tell you. I don’t know if Dad ever got into road racing with his Plastic Pigs, but it’s amusing to me to do so, in a virtual version at least. And at least the digital version doesn’t rattle, or threaten to explode.

Drag racing in the Supervan III, in Forza Horizon 4. As chase sequences go, it’s not particularly thrilling.