|
Sabra Sport Mk II - roadster body - manufactured in 1967
This month's car is quite peculiar. It was made by an Israeli manufacturer but firmly rooted in British engineering; it was meant to storm the sportscar market in the US but many of them ended up in Belgium. It's one of the more obscure cars in recent car history: it's a Sabra...
Not many people may have heard of this car, but it did play a small yet interesting part in car history. In the middle of the 1950s car production was started in Haifa, Israel, by a company aptly named Autocars. The factory itself, including tooling and engineering, was more or less a package deal delivered by Reliant Motors from Tamworth in the UK. Reliant itself was renown for its small 3-wheeled cars and Autocars started out assembling these 3-wheelers. Later the company introduced their very own 4-wheeled version of the Reliant Regent Van; named the Sussita it soon became Israel's best selling car. In the early 1960s Autocars tried to sell these cheap, fibreglass bodied cars in the US and Canada, with no success due to lack of quality.
The company's managing director however saw at the time an interesting niche in the US car market: small, affordable sportscars for young people. The British were already successfully catering to this market segment with mostly steel bodied cars, but Autocars saw some room for a little sportscar with a fibreglass body. The interesting part was that the company more or less assembled this car from parts already available on the market: the body moulds came from Ashley Laminates in Essex, a manufacturer of glassfibre hardtops who also offered a small range of glassfibre bodyshells which could be fitted on mass produced chassis from Austin or Ford. The proprietary chassis came from L.M.B. Components in Surrey, who used this chassis for its Debonair GT, a fibreglass coupe. And the engines came from Ford UK. During 1960 Autocars acquired the rights to the body moulds and the chassis construction and requested Reliant to develop these components into a production car.
In 1961 the resulting car was launched at the New York Motor Show. It was a small roadster named Sabra Sport which stood out by its large chrome bumper elements in front, apparently necessitated by US safety laws. The Sabra brand name came from a type of cactus common in Israel, which was also a nickname for native Israelis. Autocars wanted to offer the car right away though the Haifa plant was not ready tooled for it. Therefore 100 Sabras Sport were ordered from Reliant Motors, to be shipped directly to the US. For Reliant this was the first 4-wheeled car they had ever taken into production and since the sales of the car in the US were much slower than anticipated Reilant decided to offer this car under their own name in the UK as the Reliant Sabre.
The Sabra/Sabre was available as a roadster, a hardtop and from 1962 as a GT coupe. Reliant made both complete cars as well as kits which were shipped to Israel for assembly. In the following years the British and Israeli produced cars began to differ. Most of the Reliant Sabres had a shorter nose with a wider grill and were lacking the protruding front bumpers. Because the 4-cylinder 1703 cc Ford Consul engine didn't have the power to compete with MGs and Triumphs Reliant later on fitted the Ford Zephyr 6-cylinder 2553 cc unit into the Sabre, making it the Sabre Six. The Reliant Sabre 4 was produced up to 1963 while the Sabre Six lasted one year longer. In 1965 Reliant replaced the Sabre with the new Scimitar GT, continuing the fighting blade naming theme and definitely launching Reliant into the sportscar market. The Israeli Sabra was continued with only the 4-cylinder engine until 1968. From 1963 the rear wheel arches were rounded and this, together with a number of other changes, was regarded as the Mk II version of the Sabra.
The Sabra wasn't a big success with a total production of 379 cars of which 45 were right hand drive Reliant Sabres. Only 144 Sabras were sold in the US and remarkably 81 in Belgium, a small country in Western Europe. This made Belgium Sabra's second biggest export market, for which there is no real explanation. Yet the Sabra set small car manufacturer Reliant off to produce some classic sportscars like the Scimitar GT and especially GTE and it was Israel's first (and probably only) "mass produced" sportscar; no mean feat at all.
The Autocars company survived into 1974, when it was bought by Rom Carmel. From the second half of the 1960s the Reliant-based saloon cars and vans were gradually replaced with products from Leyland-Triumph. The last cars left the Haifa plant in 1980 and these days its hard to find any of these locally produced cars in Israel. In Belgium however at least 14 Sabras have survived, and also in the UK and the US there are still a number of Sabras (and Sabres) around. It's hard to say anything about its value, but the Sabra certainly deserves to be remembered.
If you want to know more about the Sabra I can recommend the Belgian Sabra website of Jozef Neefs.
© André Ritzinger, Amsterdam, Holland
|
