Two years ago I rented a car in England on holidays. Everything went fine until one morning in a small town on the Welsh border I turned LEFT onto a traffic circle (roundabout). It was in the morning before my second coffee. Traffic was slight and I just saw some silent curses from other drivers.
When you get off the car ferry from France to England there is a huge sign saying KEEP LEFT!!!
The border of Wales and England? They both use UK traffic law, don’t they? To me, that means turning left when entering a roundabout to minimize the chance of an accident. Just like in the US turning right when entering a traffic circle.
Now that would be fun, going head on in a round about. Some folks I know are left/right challenged. I won’t mention any names, but I often need to tell her “no, your other left.”
@jtsander I should have said RIGHT and yes Wales and England have the same traffic flow.
LOL, Bing, everyone from here thinks it’ll be easy, just go in the opposite direction. What most people don’t realize until they try it is that going in the opposite direction and the term “easy” are mutually exclusive. It’s confusing as h**l at first.
Another subtle difficulty, you are driving from the right side of the car. Now if everything that used to be right was left and visa versa, you could get used to that pretty fast. But not everything about the car is mirror imaged. Manual transmission gear shift levers for example.
Most of those English cars look to us like economy cars, but in England they were standard best-selling family cars. We grew up in big sedans and station wagons and they grew up in Austin 2000s and Ford Cortinas. The Mini (and Morris Minor) were economy cars, but also extremely common, more common than cheap cars in the US in the sixties. It took a long time for the British economy to recover from WWII and then they were hit with a massive decline in industrial jobs all through the seventies and eighties. Combine that with taxes that made cars and gas expensive and your typical British family could only afford a rather basic car (if that).
I suspect it won’t be too long before we see more people restoring economy cars here as the generation who grew up with them in the seventies and eighties reaches the time in middle age where they have the time and money for something like that. It will be interesting to see which models are popular restoration projects. In the last few years there have been a lot of people restoring sixties station wagons that were totally worthless a few years earlier. All because people like me who grew up in them remember them fondly. A later generation might restore early Chrysler minivans. That would be a challenge.
I grew up with economy cars in the 1970s, and I am not even slightly inclined to restore any of them. BTW, I drove an Austin America, Mercury Capri GT, Porsche 914, VW Rabbit, and Chevrolet Cavalier 2L during the 1970s and 1980s. All had a manual transmission except the Austin, and I enjoyed driving all of them. The only one I would consider owning today is the 914. The main problem (for me) with them is the pollution controls choking power to very low levels. Today that issue is overcome with engine computers, and I would much rather own a modern car than one of those old pigs.
IMHO the 914 is a very underappreciated car. It was an attempt by Porsche to create a low-end Porsche with a mid engine, and the Porsche afficiados immediately protested: “what, a Porsche without a rear engine? Rubbish!”. But I drove one and thought it was decent… albeit perhaps a bit TOO cheap!
My 914 was a lot of fun to drive. It wasn’t quick, even by mid-1970s standards, but it did hug the road magnificently.
The 914 was a good looking car. It’s a pretty common restore car featured in those English magazines in fact. That’s exactly what the restorers say, it’s not fast by today’s standards, but the suspension system and the way it handles remains excellent.
I imagine the Brits restore those little econo-cars because that’s the cars they have nostalgia for. The same reason a lot of Americans restore antique farm tractors.
I’m sure that’s true, B.L.E.
The 914 was also seen as having too much VW DNA as it was jointly designed to be made by both companies using different engines, either VW fours or Porsche sixes. It was marketed in Europe as a Volkswagens-Porsche, but in the US all versions were sold as Porsches. They didn’t think we’d go for a sporty VW that cost that much. It was intended to replace the Karmann Ghia. Porsche intended it to replace the 912, the reasonably priced four-cylinder version of the 911, but it ended up being not cheap enough. I always found the styling attractive and very original.
I never found the parts I needed to be cheap. No matter where they were made, the parts that only fit the Porsche were priced accordingly.
@jtsanders Yes, Even when Porsche used VW parts, the numbers were carefully ground off and Porsche parts stamped on and Porsche prices listed in the parts manual.
General Motors labeled and priced identical Chevrolet/Cadillac parts differently years ago, @Docnick. And they may be continuing that practice. Of course there’s not as much in common between those makes these days.
Yup. They called one the Cimarron and the other the Cavalier. 
Has any car received as little love as the poor Cimarron? There are Aztek fans and Trabant fans, but nobody loves the Cimarron. My brother was given an aging one when he was a poor grad student and even he was reluctant to be seen in it (and he doesn’t care much about cars.)
The Cimarron was probably the one vehicle that really brought down Caddy’s sales. It was NOT a luxury vehicle. Just a trimmed out Citation. It was like my brothers 80 something Ford Mustang with a 4 cylinder.