Oxfordshire, England

my grey 1959 riley would supposedly be worth around $5000 today...got mine in California for $1200 in 1962... a morris minor body with an MGA engine, geared low for acceleration Vs mini coopers... fun car but suffered from British electrics and pumps and push rods and... well, it did have that wonderful grill and walnut dashboard... beat Chevrolet Monza as well as a Lotus Elite at an autocross..(they blew their engines). mini coopers beat me of course.

Doesn’t look in the slightest like a Morris Minor (I have had one for 28 years, a convertible). SU electric fuel pumps are easily overhauled and all the parts are still made by SU. Positive earth electrics are a bit of a nuisance but the polarity can be reversed when upgrading from a dynamo to an alternator. A-series engines are bombproof. My Morris has been completely round the clock, over a million miles but not on the same engine.

I should have said "morris minor monococque body/chassis" ...obviously morris minor's beautiful body looks very different from this riley. I also owned and loved a morris minor.

As for "easily overhauled" and "nuisance", those factors, plus the assumed cheap availability of labor, are the essence of British "engineering." I learned more in six months from fooling with my riley's guts than I learned from years of volkswagens, which rarely needed tinkering and, because german, had excellent electrics and tubular push rods etc.

Haha. British Engineering is why my car is still going after 1 1/4 million miles. I've never understood complaints about electrics. Perhaps they don't export well to different climates.