1970s Leyland P76 - Australia's most hated classic car?!

Leyland P76

By the time the P76 arrived on the forecourt, the Australian market had been sold plenty of British vehicles and the link between British Leyland and Australia was well established.

For more information on how this market developed, it’s worth looking at the Export or Die policy which kicked in after the Second World War. Essentially, manufacturers of vehicles had to sell a proportion of their vehicles abroad to access the government’s steel supplies and of course, bring much needed money into the country.

A Morris video from the immediate post war period states 95% of Morris products were exported.

In short, this means more than a handful of Australians were thoroughly well acquainted with the British marques.

Now back to the P76. This is a really interesting creation by British Leyland because many of these earlier vehicles which had arrived in the 40s, 50s and 60s were designed for the British market and with that, were thoroughly unsuitable for the Australian market where drivers were going hundreds of miles and crossing rocky terrain.

The journey to the creation of the car was a logical one: British Leyland knew that to compete in the Australian market with marques such as Ford and Chrysler they needed to make a car which was designed with the terrain, the competition and the customer expectation in mind.

It wasn’t Leyland’s first foray into making an Australian offering and the Kimberley had come before it, but the P76 was the car Leyland Australia saw as the car which would redefine their position in the market.

First off, the car did away with the wheezy engines which had powered their British cousins and the company went in with two engine options to rival the American competitors like the Ford Falcon, Holden Kingswood and Chrysler Valiant and issued the car with a v8 or a 6.

Recognising what Australians were used to, the company designed the vehicle with a 111 inch wheelbase and paired the meaty engine choices with either an automatic or manual, rack and pinion steering and for the suspension the company went with MacPherson struts with coil springs, dampers and anti roll bar to front and four link with coil springs and dampers to rear.

The car also had 35 cubic feet of boot space, which practically tested, was big enough to hide me and the week’s shopping in the boot.

Now all of this was going well so far - Leyland had spent 20 million Australian dollars on the creation of the P76 and it was rigorously tested: Leyland stated within the sales brochures the cars had been tested in three separate operations over four years doing the equivalent of 100,000 miles of testing and they even tested in the Australian outback in the searing heat.

And the car stood up to every challenge, which convinced Leyland it was wise to take the car to market. The car even won Wheels Car of the Year 1973 but then something terrible happened: everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

I talk about this when we go driving but essentially early cars poorly built, an oil crisis, rumoured sabotage from market rivals and silly little errors which could’ve been avoided culminated in the car described on marketing booklets as anything but average becoming anything but reliable.

Leyland tried to combat this with a Buyer Protection Plan covering the car for the first 12,000 miles but the damage was done and buyers weren’t keen.

In the end, quite frustratingly, all the hard work didn’t pay off and the fiesty P76 didn’t cut into the market like it deserved to; selling around 18,000 units. Today, the car is a beloved underdog of classic fanatics in Australia and New Zealand, but with far fewer fans than it should’ve had if everything had gone to plan and hadn’t been overly rushed.