In the long, proud history of Australian motoring, our domestic car industry has produced its share of memorable motor vehicles. There was Ford’s famous GTHO Falcon - the world’s fastest four door sedan in its day, a whole swag of memorable Monaros, Bathurst winning Toranas, and more. We’ve even produced one-off gems, like the Bolwell Nagari of the 1970s.
But for every GTHO Falcon, HSV Monaro and Bolwell Nagari Australia has also produced more than its fair share of real clunkers. The word “Leyland” is sure to produce groans and eye rolls from older Australian motorists, while cars like the Holden Camira are long gone and thoroughly unlamented.
However, when it comes to clunkers one Australian car stands head and shoulders above the pack, a legend in Australian automotive history for all the wrong reasons. It’s the Lightburn Zeta, a car that aimed low and missed – badly.
Part car, part cement mixer
The Lightburn Zeta was the ambitious brainchild of Harold Lightburn, whose South Australian business was better known for producing cement mixers and washing machines. The Zeta may have had a wheel on each corner, making it vaguely car-like, but it had the heart and soul of a washing machine, or was it a cement mixer perhaps?
The lightweight microcar was made of fiberglass, a material Lightburn Industries was well familiar with, making it rustproof, but raising concerns about its safety and durability. It was powered, if that’s not too strong a word for it, by a thundering 324cc two stroke engine from Villiers, a German motorbike maker.
Among its many novel features was a four-speed gearbox without a reverse gear. To make it go backwards you turned off the motor and restarted it with the motor running backwards. Confusing? Damn right! But it did give the Zeta one novel claim to fame – it could hit its top speed of about 96 kilometres per hour in forward or reverse!
But that was by no means the end to its engineering idiosyncrasies. A piece of transparent pipe on the dashboard connected to a gravity-fed fuel tank behind the dash served as the fuel gauge. So, whether your tank was half-full or half-empty depended on whether you were heading up hill or down.
While the boxy little oddity may have looked like a hatchback, it wasn’t, and the only way to access the space behind the back seats was to take them out. The “ease” with which you could achieve that was marketed as a selling point!
The “Sports” model
Harold Lightburn presented it to a bemused Australian public in 1963, just as the all-conquering Morris Mini hit the market for just £60 more. Lightburn was nothing if not ambitious, however. As well as the Lightburn sedan, there was a micro utility variant, which must have been good for carrying at least a couple of bricks, and a “Sports” model without doors that boasted a puny, wheezing 498cc two-cylinder two-stroke producing all of 15.5 kilowatts. It was a thoroughly laughable effort competing with cars like the beautiful little Honda S600 Sports. It had a high-revving double overhead cam 606cc motor with four carburettors producing triple the power, and was good for 140km/h.
Failure
With competition like that, and the Morris Mini, it was little wonder that the Australian motoring public stayed away from Lightburn’s contraptions in droves. In the three years before its demise in 1966, Lightburn sold a mere 363 vehicles, including just 28 of the Sports model, and eight utes.
That makes them very, very rare, and something of a collector’s item, with a Lightburn Sports changing hands in the US for no less than US$51,750 back in 2013. It’s a beautifully restored example of one of the weirdest cars ever to roll off an Australian production line.
We’ll leave the last word on the Zeta to Australian motoring writer Tony Davis, whose book Lemon! 60 Heroic Failures of Motoring lauds the car’s entry to the Hall of Shame with the memorable line “with the Zeta, however, failure was built into it from day one”.