Junkyard Find: 1969 Austin 1800 "Landcrab"
The BMC ADO17, popularly known as the Landcrab, sold pretty well in Europe but was nearly unknown in North America. Not completely unknown, though; a few Landcrabs were sold in the United States, and one of them has just washed up in a San Francisco Bay Area self-service wrecking yard.
With the same 1800cc pushrod B engine as the MGB, the Landcrab wasn’t going to win any drag races with, say, Slant Six Plymouth Valiants with a couple of bad plug wires, but its front-wheel-drive layout gave it a very spacious interior for its small footprint.
This one has the look of a project car that sat in a California back yard for a quarter-century or so, but it still has plenty of parts to offer one of the handful of American Landcrab owners.
I know of just one running Landcrab on this continent, and that’s this Mazda V6-powered example, which Silversleeves Racing ran at the 2013 Pacific Northworst 24 Hours of LeMons race earlier this year. I’ll let them know there’s a parts car just 1,000 miles to the south!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Man...if only she were in running shape! Ol' ADO17 has the distinction of being the last production car Sir Alec Issigonis designed. I dream of getting a nice one some day to have my Issigonis collection: Morris Minor, Austin Mini and a Morris 1600/1800.
A friends parents had one in what must have been the mid 80s. Never got a ride in it but they were pretty common as you would expect in Coventry at that time, you still very occasionally see them. I can remember a few random fact about them, Apparently the only passenger car with a greater torsional rigidity was a Merc. The dipsticks on early ones were wrongly calibrated. The later Australians models were restyled and named Austin Kimberley & Tasmin depending if they had the B-series or the E6. Oz also had a Ute version The B-series was tougher then the E6 lasting about 150,000 as opposed to the E6 100,000 Pininfarina did the styling Won the European car of the year award in 1965 i believe