A well-engineered Ford-special, the Reliant Sabre was born in 1961 when the British Reliant company, maker of lightweight three-wheelers teamed up with Autocars of Israel. Autocars bought the rights to Lesley Ballamay's ladder frame chassis and one of Ashley's fibreglass bodies in order to make an instant sports car to sell to America. Reliant engineered the car with 1703 cc Ford Consul engine and supplied the kits to Israel where Autocars assembled them.

Israelic build Sabras are chassis number 4xxx and they where build from 200 kits produced by the Tamworth factory and send to Autocars (aka Sabra) It is not reported how many of these cars where ever produced.
Reliant Sabre 4: 208 were built in chassis ranging from 200001 to 200208
Reliant Sabre 6: (SS300xxx), 77 built (not including the three Sabre-6 look-alike Sabre-4 with shortened nose)

Autocars wasn't prepared in time to assemble the kits so the production and export of the Sabras started and did run for a while at the Reliant factory with the cars never seeing Israel at all!

From 1962 the vulgar nose treatment was chopped and a GT version was offered. This updated version was also offered by a six-cylinder Ford Zephyr image. But it costed nearly the same as an Austin-Healey 3000 so it was not a success at all. In 1964 debuted the successor of Sabre, named Scimitar.

1960 Reliant Sabre Convertible. Chassis No. 1 prototype car. Wire wheels, manual gears, finished in powder blue with dark blue leather piped tight blue.

The red car belongs to Mr. Jacobs, who supplied the pictures as well, the blue prototype was offered for sale in 1996 by a British company, specializing in interesting motorcars.

Corrections, additions were submitted by Chris Pallasch maintainer of ScimWeb - Reliant Scimitar and Sabre Web

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