Reliant Scimitar: the sporting estate that invented its own class (1964–1986)

Park a Scimitar GTE beside the sports-estates the premium German brands sell today and you are looking at the original idea. The Reliant Scimitar began in 1964 as a glassfibre grand-touring coupe, but its 1968 GTE version invented the fast estate outright, years before anyone else, and did it from a three-wheeler factory in Tamworth. Add a Ford V6, royal patronage and prices that never caught up with the achievement, and you have one of the great undervalued British classics.

From Sabre to Scimitar

Reliant’s sports-car line started awkwardly in 1961 with the Sabre, a curious-looking roadster developed from an export project, whose early cars raced with more grit than glory. Its worthwhile inheritance was a sound chassis. In 1964 Reliant clothed a developed version of it in a crisp Ogle-designed glassfibre coupe body and named the result Scimitar GT: Ford six-cylinder power, proper GT manners and looks that owed nothing to the three-wheelers paying the bills. The Sabre is now the connoisseur’s rarity; the GT was the foundation.

The GTE: inventing the sporting estate

In 1968 Ogle’s Tom Karen reworked the coupe into something genuinely new: the GTE, a four-seat sporting estate with a rising glass tailgate, a flat load deck and the 3.0-litre Ford Essex V6. It was fast, handsome and useful in a way no rival could match, because there were no rivals; the class did not exist until bigger manufacturers copied it. The GTE became Reliant’s flagship and its best seller, and the SE6 revision of 1975 made it larger and more comfortable still. A convertible GTC followed in 1980, elegant and now rare.

The endorsement money could not buy came from Buckingham Palace: Princess Anne received her first GTE in 1970 and owned a succession of them for decades, occasionally at speeds that made the newspapers. No image-conscious buyer could ask for better proof that the GTE was no joke-company product.

Middlebridge and the long afterlife

GTE production ended in 1986, but the idea refused to die. Middlebridge of Nottingham acquired the rights and from 1988 built a thoroughly updated GTE with Ford’s fuel-injected 2.9 V6; only around eighty cars were completed before funding collapsed in 1990, making Middlebridge Scimitars the rarest and most resolved of the line, and the model the club concours judges measure everything else against. The name returned once more on the smaller SS1 roadster family, a different car for a different decade.

What a Scimitar is like to drive

The GTE’s party trick is how modern it feels. The Essex V6 makes its torque low down, so the car strides rather than strains, overdrive gives long-legged cruising, and the glassfibre body over a stout chassis keeps weight sensible, which means brisk cross-country pace without drama. The driving position is commanding for a sporting car of its era, four adults genuinely fit, and the load bay swallows what a weekend actually requires. It is easy to see why a busy royal kept buying them: the GTE does the fast, useful, unpretentious thing better than almost anything of its decade.

The car’s age shows mostly in the details, heavier low-speed steering on early cars, brakes that want a firm foot, and the usual 1970s ergonomic comedy, and none of it dilutes the essential competence. Later SE6 cars trade a little agility for space and refinement; the earlier SE5 is the sharper drive. Either makes a genuinely usable classic, one of the few of its age that can join a motorway and simply keep up.

Buying a Reliant Scimitar today

The glassfibre body cannot rust, which redirects the inspection underneath. The separate steel chassis rots where mud sits, at the rear spring hangers, outriggers and around the front suspension, and a proper look on ramps is worth more than any amount of shiny gel coat; crazing and star cracks in the glassfibre itself are cosmetic but tedious to put right. The Ford engines are cheap, understressed and endlessly supported; overheating is their one enemy, so check the cooling system. Interiors and Scimitar-specific trim are the scarce items, and electrics reward patience.

Club support is a real asset here: the owners’ community runs spares schemes and remanufactures the scarce items, which keeps a Scimitar on the road more cheaply than its rarity suggests.

Values remain the bargain of the class the car invented: usable GTEs from around £4,000, good ones £6,000 to £12,000, with early GT coupes, the GTC and Middlebridge cars above that. For the money, nothing else Reliant built, and little anyone else built in the 1970s, covers ground with the same blend of pace, space and character. The era’s context lives in the cars of the 1970s.

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