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In base-model world, the trim is always vinyl, the carpets are always thin (if they are there at all) and the engine is always a little smaller than it should be and connected to a gearbox with fewer speeds than is good for it. It's a world of stark painted metal, blanked-off switches, single carburettors, seats that don't recline, wind-down windows and a clock where you expected to find a rev-counter. Stripped of their trim, poverty models were often naked little cars built for no-frills motoring and sold as company vehicles or to a wider audience when there was a mood of austerity in the air, typically at the time of a petrol crisis.
It's a genre that has thrown up some oddities, cars that have become almost mythical because they are so rare, such as the Ford Anglia 103G, with its single-speed wiper and minimal chromework. If you spotted one, its driver might well be making hand signals, because it didn't even have indicators. Then there was the standard Jaguar XJ 2.8, a vinyl-trimmed basic XJ6 Jag that was catalogued but never actually built.
So welcome to the world of the top-10 poverty models, a murky place where cars were trimmed down to the barest essentials to keep the price low and get punters through the door - in the hope that they might then be talked into buying something a little pricier, and more profitable.
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