Now I suppose I can own up. More than thirty years have passed, the shame has faded and neither my old mum nor my children are likely to read this. So here goes. In 1975 I bought a Bond Bug and ran it for about six months. Look, I was young; we all do silly things at some point in our lives. It was a weird time – the first series of The Sweeney was on TV and Typically Tropical was at number one with that song about going to Barbados. My Bond Bug was tiny. It was noisy. It wobbled about a lot. It was the silliest car I’ve ever owned. It scared the life out of me on several occasions. And I loved it.

There was never anything else on the roads quite like the Bond Bug – a large wedge of Red Leicester dashing along on three tiny wheels; every single one painted ‘Vista Orange’. It was designed by Tom Karen, who was also responsible for that other Seventies icon, the Chopper push bike. Under the glassfibre body it was pure Reliant Regal apart from the coil spring suspension, but the buyer that the Bug was aimed at could hardly have been different from the traditional three-wheeler owner.

After the Second World War the British working man’s daily transport was either a push bike or a motorcycle – and if it was the latter then it was probably built around an inexpensive, reliable and utterly unexciting Villiers two-stroke engine. The three-wheeler car was the next step up the automotive and social ladder. They were cheap to buy and to run, and offered family transport for Everyman, albeit at a gentle pace and with the aroma of burning two-stroke never far away.

A three-wheeler was a slightly more civilised alternative to bolting a sidecar to a motorcycle, and it was also a visible sign of increasing comfort and affluence. It wasn’t a Morris Minor or an A35, sure, but at least you were out of the rain and on your way to a better life. Or a caravan.

The Fifties was the decade of the three-wheeler, but taxation changes and the emergence of much better looking small cars such as the Mini and the Hillman Imp in the early Sixties started to erode their marketplace.

The first Bond car was designed by Laurie Bond, and made in Preston by Sharp’s Commercials in 1949. It was a basic machine, aluminium bodied and powered by either a 125 or 197cc Villiers engine mounted up against the single front wheel. There were brakes on the rear wheels only and the specification didn’t run to doors, but Laurie Bond sold 2,000 of them, and a slow but steady evolution began.

In 1965 Bond finally turned its back on the two-stroke motors, and used Commer’s 875cc four-stroke van engine in an all-new model, which offered unheard of top speeds. The company also produced a four-wheeled sports car based on the Triumph Herald, the Bond Equipe – which became really rather attractive in its Mk2 guise, particularly as the convertible (and fast too, with the 2.5 litre straight-6 Vitesse engine).

The larger British manufacturer of three-wheelers was of course Reliant, based in Tamworth in Staffordshire, who had started out in 1935 making vans powered by 600cc JAP engines. By the end of the Sixties Reliant’s sales – at 15,000 cars a year - were out-pacing Bond ten to one, and they moved in on their smaller rival following an unsuccessful management buy-out at Bond, and swallowed them up.

By August 1970 production of all Bond’s range had ceased, but it was at this point that Reliant’s management decided that the Bond name would be used for an all-new car – one that would sell to skinny-hipped men wearing floral print shirts and matching ties. And some anonymous hero called it the Bug, which was a triumph of self-deprecating understatement in an age when car’s badges greatly over-stated their worth – the Avenger being the worst culprit. 

The Bug’s purpose, as the marketing campaign made clear, was to attract lithe young ladies in satin hot pants and white plastic boots. They would be stunned by the radical design and the sheer modernity of the one-piece front-hinged roof, and once inside they would be equally wowwed by the slinky form-hugging seats and the groovy central instrument console. This was to be a poor boy’s Mini Cooper S, but the adverts promised that the outcome with the lady in question would be just the same.

The original Bug was the 700, which was to be offered in basic form with no side screens and just a prop to hold up the roof. In fact only one was built and all Bugs were designated either 700E or ES. The ES offered higher compression, as well as aluminium wheels and low profile tyres, wing mirrors, headrests, air horns, and mud flaps. The spare wheel went in the (surprisingly large) boot, the lid of which was made of plywood.

In ’73 the Bug’s engine capacity went up to 750cc, and by the time Reliant abandoned the cute little car in May 1974 all of 2,268 had been made. The factory also made one prototype four-wheeled Bug, which apparently still exists.