Our AP5 -2W Valiant had an interesting shift linkage to get from a LHD gearbox to RHD.

I to have a funny story re a hoon in an Opel powered Torana & My MKII Zephyr on a hot day on the Hume Highway. Save to say the Z was a week since top overhaul & is designed to run at 70mph all day: More staying power so it won. Those Opel engines were a worry.

The only Torana that ever had an Opel engine (from new, anyway) was the LH and it was a 1.9 litre 4 cylinder. I know, my mum had one.

I suspect your Zephyr could have beaten it with one cylinder out!

They eventually replaced it with the equally execrable Starfire engine, which was the 2.8 litre 6 with two cylinders cut off.

The earlier Torana 4s had Vauxhall engines. Shudder!

It is pertinent to mention that more Toranas came fitted with 5.0 litre V8s than 2.0 lite fours. Rightly so too. I wouldn't mind betting that Australia was the only manufacturer of a small car that came with five engine choices, a four, two sixes and two eights.

I had an LJ Torana with the 2.8l engine. The car had a habit of doing 360s if you hit the anchors hard, or not even hard if you were going downhill. More luckily for me, and passengers on two occasions, it stayed on the correct side of the road. After the third occasion, got rid of it.

My first Torana, a 1974 LH, had a habit of doing 360s just by the driver using the accelerator pedal. The highway patrol eventually told me why. I was just lucky that doing a burnout wasn't strictly illegal back in those days, or at least not as illegal as it is now.

On a serious note - the Torana was an absolute legend of a car, doing everything from being a cab in Malaysia and Indonesia through to ferrying nuns and bowling teams around to winning the Bathurst 1000, on top of being a genuine boy-racer's car. Such cars are, sadly, no longer made.

I miss the days of wide engine choice, the bench seat and column shifter.

I now have a 10 year old Lexus IS250. Being a Toyota, nothing ever goes wrong with it, 250,000 km. Except that just recently one of the fans has started making a noise.

This is a rear drive car about the same size as the Torana, and you can get the IS with a turbo 2 litre 4, a hybrid, two sixes and an 8. There is no Toyota equivalent model. I have the 2.5 litre V6 and it has enough poke for me.

Stability control means you can drive it vigorously on damp, dirt forest roads and it will pull you back into line if you overdo it and warn you!

ESP is now on just about all modern cars. Sadly, most of them won't win a Bathurst 1000 in any guise, though as things stand with the butchering of local tin-top motor racing (and this predates the scrapping of local assembly plants) it matters little.

Does the Lex come with a bench seat up front though?

No. Should it??

Back in the 60s I scrapped the bench seat in the FC in favour of a pair of seats from a Peugeot. Much better!

Needed a bit of panel beating of the floorpan.

Agree with Ian, after a whip lash episode (idiot driver rear ended me at high speed) I ripped the bench seat out of the Morris and installed 2 bucket seats with head rests, lumbar support and seat belts. Had to make a subframe up to pick up the feet and extend the gear shift but well worth it.
Try whiplash and you will get rid of any seat without a head rest and no belts.
That means most cars built in the 60's and previous.
Originality spoilt, try whip lash for months and you can stick originality!
Fred.

I'll give you this, bench seats didn't have much in the way of head rests, though in my case, being 6 foot 3, there's few bucket seats that measure up either. The few seats that do provide protection usually have the headrest in the wrong position despite the occasional claim that the seats are designed by orthopaedic surgeons. Why doesn't a seat designer design them?

Brad I'm tall too, with back issues thrown in, and the seat design of the IS250 was one of the reasons for the choice. Adjustable headrests that go high enough. I can drive this car from Melbourne to Sydney non-stop and still feel OK when I arrive.

I recall in the 60s one of the motoring magazines opining that those who design car seats should have to sit in them while they are doing so!

My Commodore will go all the way - just - if I take things easy though I couldn't do it myself now. Back when I started driving it wouldn't have been a lot easier though I enjoy the two breaks I take these days, usually at Yass & Mokoan going south and Holbrook & Pheasants Nest coming back.The thing I liked about the old bench seats was that I'd sink down into them and if the car hit a big bump the seat would absorb it better. They were just like the seats on the old red rattler trains. It was easier to stretch the legs whilst driving too.

Sadly they aren't ADR-compliant now. For a long time the driver has had to have an independent seat. My 1994 Commodore had the Kingswood-style column shifter and the 'nut cracker' hand brake lever on the right hand side of the driver's seat. The driver's seat was the same bucket seat that the 5-passenger version had but the two front passengers sat on a bucket-bench arrangement.