Picture Car Confidential #3: It’s Hard Out There for an Imp

As in most service industries, it pays to have a specialty when you’re in the picture car business. It also pays, it turns out, to choose your specialty wisely. Was it shrewd to stock up as we did at Octane Film Cars on right-hand-drive British cars? Or was it a matter of my own creeping Anglophilia getting the better of me? Short answer: Both.

It helps to know that American movie and TV productions often economize by filming scenes in the United States that are meant to take place in other countries. Cities with older buildings can do a plausible job of standing in for the architecture and ambiance of foreign lands. To fully sell it, though, the right cars are key. (As are the clothes, the hairstyles, the street and lawn furniture, the signage, etc. Of course, that’s someone else’s job.)

It’s also important to remember the American regulatory state’s “25-year rule,” enacted in 1988, which exempts cars manufactured 25 years and older from compliance with federal Department of Transportation rules, allowing for their legal importation. Another reg perversely requires an imported vehicle’s EPA compliance with modern standards for all vehicles up to 21 years old, which might mean something were it not for the longer DOT run-up to exemption. (In Canada, there is only a 15-year exclusion.) Executive summary: You still can’t legally import a car not sold in the U.S. until it has celebrated its 25th birthday.

While overall a rule to be applauded, it does limit, crucially, what right-hand-drive British cars (or, for that matter, any foreign car) may be legally imported here. Hence, the Octane fleet has amassed a collection of a dozen or so RHD cars so venerable that, for all the fascination they hold in my eyes, they can’t credibly populate a scene set in the present day. Unless it’s meant to be a flashback scene or a movie featuring an eclectically downscale classic British car show. (I’d pay money to see that.)

Wait a second, I hear you say. “Haven’t there been many more modern RHD Jeeps and Subarus sold in America, through the years, for rural postal deliveries?” Yes, there have, and for today’s buyer on a budget, those cars are out there, too. Though cursory research has revealed that most such examples are smoky high-mile time bombs suitable only for use in a modern-day Grapes of Wrath remake, or perhaps in some long-overdue documentaries about rust, mismatched paint, decomposing interiors, worn suspensions, and the lifestyles of the poor and obscure. Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a movie or show actually filmed in Britain where the streets were lined with tired Cherokees and broasted Legacy wagons? Historic verisimilitude, in our game, is the goal.

Still, late 20th-century right-hand-drive cars are a niche and we are proudly tending our lowly corner of it. A military Land Rover Series IIA, expatriated from England in 1990, was my first extended introduction to driving cars built for use on the wrong side of the road on the right side of the road. A Mark I Lotus-Cortina came next, but one that helped introduce us to the silver screen followed: a 1971 Triumph 13/60 Estate. (Think Herald wagon, built up to Vitesse spec by a dedicated West Virginia schoolteacher, meaning six cylinders and overdrive transmission from the mechanically-related GT6.) After an appearance on the TV show Pan Am, the Triumph went on to fill so many production calls for an older right-hand-drive car that, within a few years, it paid for itself and then some.

More typical, though, is the experience of our 1964 Hillman Imp, an incredible survivor with known history imported from England four years ago. It was purchased on a lark, following a rare and typically short-lived windfall, and with help from our friend Neil Campbell, former staffer for the irreverent U.K. publication Practical Classics and now Vehicle Collection Manager at the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust in Gaydon.

This particular Imp, a U.K. club favorite (sorry, favourite) with known history, now trundles the streets and parkways of New York and New Jersey, resplendent in its original Willow Green. (I’m an absolute pushover for 1960s British pastels, I admit it.) It works for the picture car operation now and then but, let’s face it, if someone needs an Imp, they better be calling us if they hope to find one. To say that it is in high demand, on the other hand, would be an overstatement.

From childhood, I’ve always admired Imps (witness the several battered scale models on my bookshelf) but their actual presence on U.S. roads was slight, with an estimated 5000 examples sold through the years. A product initially of the Rootes Group, a proud second-tier British manufacturer dating back to the 1920s whose accumulated brands—Hillman, Sunbeam, Singer, Humber, and Commer truck—were far too stuffy and conservative for anyone to predict something as radical as the Imp. The car debuted in 1963, the year before Chrysler started buying into Rootes, a purchase that completed in 1967 and, what do you know, didn’t deliver either company to the promised land.

Designed for Rootes by former Formula 1 racing engineer Michael Parkes, the Imp, being rear-engine, has often been compared to the Volkswagen Beetle, one of its contemporaries, but the latter is in essence a product of the 1930s. The Imp is a much more modern, technically advanced car from the days when rear-engine cars weren’t out of fashion. It’s also frequently compared to BMC’s Mini, another product of the Suez oil crisis of 1956. Despite their many differences, both cars brought funky fresh engineering and adorable style (the Imp’s often thought to have been inspired by Chevrolet’s Corvair) to the task of squeezing more miles out of an imperial gallon. But the Mini outsold the Imp handsomely (5.4 million versus 440,000) though it had a longer production run: 41 years versus the Imp’s 13. And not entirely because it was better.

For one thing, the Imp had more storage capacity. As a first, and in a manner ahead of its time, the Imp deployed a glass hatch in the rear to grant access to an area large enough to hold half a dozen grocery bags. A folding rear seat further supplements storage available in the front trunk. Advantage: Imp.

Sometimes called “a poor man’s Porsche,” the Imp had independent rear suspension sporting semi-trailing arms at a time when Porsches still featured swing axles. A class move for a budget-priced car in 1963. Still, it was possibly trumped by the Imp’s extremely lightweight (170-pound) all-aluminum overhead-cam engine. It was based on a design licensed from Coventry-Climax, a longtime maker of small-batch engines that bid for a British government contract in the early 1950s to design and build lighter and more efficient engines to run fire pumps.

Designed by Walter Hassan, an ex-Bentley, Bristol and engineer behind the now-legendary Jaguar XK six-cylinder engine, the pump engine impressed the government and was soon discovered to be, with suitable modification, the basis for a spritely, high-performance racing engine of unusual light weight. (It was used by the likes of Lotus and Cooper, among others.) A version of Coventry-Climax’s FMWA engine was readied by Rootes for mass production, displacing 875 cc, while a 998-cc version saw duty later in the model’s run; ever hotter versions were built ex-works in decades to come as Imps enjoyed considerable rally and touring car racing success.

We’re keeping this Imp stock, mind you. We’ve got enough bills and headaches. But even with a hair over 40 horsepower, 56 lb-ft of torque, and 60 years of respectful miles under its belt, it keeps up with traffic, even exhibiting a willingness to cruise at 70 mph on the highway, which exceeds the local speed limit.  Our car revs unlike any stock old Mini we’ve driven, and the rear-mounted gearbox is a model of positivity, especially the feel of its shifter as compared to that of an old Beetle.

All in all, the Imp likely perplexed Chrysler’s big car-positive American management, but it was forced to stick with the vehicle anyway. Heavy government investment on the model’s behalf had funded a factory for it to use in Linwood, Scotland, an area of oft-heavy unemployment. Far away from its suppliers—a costly bottleneck—the well-intentioned location brought to light the inexperience of an unexpectedly ornery workforce and wasn’t assisted in any way by a teetering British economy, or all of Rootes’ multitudinous other problems. Though it would be stuck with the Imp (sold as a Hillman, Sunbeam, Singer, and Commer van) until 1976, Chrysler sold its stake in what in 1978 had become Chrysler Europe to PSA, for a nominal $1 fee. The British Broadcasting Company later described the Imp as “the wrong car built at the wrong time by the wrong people at the wrong place.”

Is the Imp the wrong car for showbiz, circa 2024? Not entirely, but it’s looking like period pieces, few and far between as they are, will compose its bread and butter. Curiously, though, for a car with such a happy face, the Imp’s theatrical work so far has seen it rubbing shoulders with some pretty dark corners of the human mind: several days’ background work in an Amazon Prime remake (as a limited television series) of the chilling David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers, for instance. Loosely based on fact, it recounted the creepy tale of a pair of identically sadistic twin gynecologists who are up to no good. More recently, several days as a background player in London’s Soho (filmed near the Brooklyn/Queens border,) where it played in the Tom Holland series The Crowded Room, a dramatized account of the first murderer to plead innocence by virtue of multiple personality syndrome.

All highly recommended, like the Imp.

A man of many pursuits (rock band manager, automotive journalist, concours judge, purveyor of picture cars for film and TV), Jamie Kitman lives and breathes vintage machines. His curious taste for interesting, oddball, and under-appreciated classics—which traffic through his Nyack, New York warehouse—promises us an unending stream of delightful cars to discuss. For more Picture Car Confidential columns, click here.