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Humber Sceptre


If you're going to get into British cars, you might as well forget about those dime-a-dozen BMC/British Leyland products and dive into the bewildering labyrinth of Rootes Group marques and models... and once you've committed yourself to Rootes Group madness, skip right over the Sunbeams and even the Hillmans and start scouring every Craigslist site in the country for Humbers. Right now, you can find this GM 4.3 V6-swapped Super Snipe (bewilderingly described as a 1954 Chevy Bel Air) and this all-Rootes '64 Super Snipe, but resist Super Snipe temptation!

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Humber Sceptre

The Rootes Group overlords of the early 1960s were banging together Singer Vogues and Hillman Super Minxes and figured they'd make an upmarket, crypto-sporty version of the Super Minx and slap some Humber badges on it: Sceptre! The Sceptre started life with a Rootes 1,592cc four-cylinder engine and vaguely Rambler American-esque styling. Later in the 1960s, Rootes (by that time called Chrysler of Europe) made a version of the Hillman Hunter that was sold as a Humber Sceptre, and what makes this car great is the fact that it is thus a sibling to the Iran Khodro Paykan, which was built until 2004. Just to muddy the waters some more, Peugeot bought Chrysler's European assets and made Sceptre versions of various Peugeot models in the early 1990s. For the weird history of the Sceptre alone, I yearn for this car.