I bought this almost as soon as I started working. This was the first half-decent car I had ever
owned, being only just over a year old when I bought it. Each monthly payment was more than I had
ever paid for a whole car.
It wasn't long before it had twin spotlights on the front bumper. Maserati air horns. A rear fog light. A tiny leather steering wheel (which, incidentally, made the car almost impossible to park). A home-made (but entirely presentable!) centre console for the fandabby STEREO radio-cassette player. Adjustable shock absorbers.
But the piece de resistance, its crowning glory, the one modification that made it stand out from everything else, was the sunroof.
As far as I am aware, in the late 1970's there wasn't a single production car available, on which you could order a sunroof. They had been phased out in the 1960s, mainly because they were made of canvas and almost invariably leaked, and the need to stay dry on 364 days of the year outweighed the pleasure of being able to open the roof on the one sunny day. Unless you were mad.
Ahem. Step forward one Mr C.
I found a rustproofing company who were advertising that they could fit a glass sunroof to any car except a VW Beetle (the roof's too curvy, apparently). They were importing them from America because nobody in the UK was making them at that time. I bought the biggest one they had - a "Le Van Combo" - it had two separate glass flaps, one above each front seat, and a bar up the middle with a strip light that was wired into the interior light. This was proper UV-resistant tinted and mirrored glass, not the cheap dot-matrix screen-printed rubbish you get today. The glass was also removable for days when you were really desperate either to get your bonce sunburnt, or just show off.
It was, in my humble view, the absolute mutt's nuts.
After it was fitted it leaked only once, and that was in a torrential downpour. I was advised to rub vaseline into the seals, and that did the trick.
After that, other companies sprang up, fitting UK-made examples. Then dealers started fitting them as after-sales options. Then the factory started fitting proper tilt-and-slide versions, until nearly every car on sale had to have a sunroof. This trend was only reversed after the ubiquitous fitting of air conditioning to cars in the late 1990s.
So I like to think that in this small way, I was one of the early trend-setters. Sad eh?
...