Australian family cars with slight defects include a new Zephyr station wagon where the chrome strip on the rear door didn’t line up properly. My father was told it wasn’t the strip – the whole door was out of alignment. Overspray on the blank chrome dashboard knobs of the new XL Falcon wagon was one item among a few niggly things we found annoying. My VC Commodore company car’s metallic paint was pretty patchy on the bonnet and the headlining fitment wasn’t up to scratch either. As has been said here before, my current VF Commodore is of a high standard. The quality control of Australian BMC cars was at its best from about 1964 through about 1969. Products like the Mini De Luxe and Cooper S, 1100 and 1800 were of a pretty high standard, particularly in areas such as paint, trim fit, rust proofing were as good as any produced here. In my opinion an Australian version was superior to its equivalent produced in the UK as I found out in the three years I worked there in the early ‘70s. Having said that, the quality dropped off when Leyland started to take over. My current 1970 1800 has appalling shut lines compared with the earlier 1966 example I owned. The P76 can be criticised for poor quality control, but they did get better over time. My brother bought one of the last sold in Victoria and it was almost up to scatch, but he reckoned he used to go round it with a Phillips Head s**** driver and tighten everything up. Maybe that’s the difference between outright design and build quality. No amount of good build quality will occur if the parts are not right to begin with.