Lancia Automobiles is a long-lived car builder in Italy that never had a lot of success selling vehicles in the U.S. market. The Beta was an “entry-level luxury car” and the HPE, like the seller’s example, was one of its variants. This nice-looking HPE was buried inside a dry garage for 26 years, so it’s a non-running project that the seller doesn’t have the time or energy for. Located in Albany, New York, this Lancia is available here on Facebook Marketplace for $2,000, which would normally put it into cheap wheels territory. Chuck Foster gets points for bringing us this rare tip for us!
The Beta was hatched in 1972 and was part of the Lancia landscape until 1984. It was the first new product from the company since Fiat took control in the late 1960s. It’s unclear how many Betas, including the HPE (for High-Performance Estate or Executive) ever made it to the U.S. These cars would come with dual overhead camshaft (DOHC) engines, 5-speed transmissions, an independent 4-wheel suspension set-up and disc brakes at each corner. The HPE, which arrived in 1975, was a 3-door “shooting brake” which meant hatchback to U.S. consumers.
This was probably a really nice car until around 1998. That’s when it got “buried” (the seller’s wording) inside a garage and stayed there until recently before coming up for air. The odometer reads 55,000 miles, so we’d bet that’s an accurate assessment of how much the car was used in its first 19 years. Unlike a lot of these cars, it has an automatic transmission. But the machine hasn’t started or moved on its own power since before Y2K. While the engine is said to turn freely, we suspect the fuel delivery system will need a complete refreshment.
The interior has received some attention as the leather seats were restitched and it looks fairly good right now. Some electrical work may have been done, too, as the seller makes a point of saying all the lighting works as it should. But, make no mistake, this is a project car and may need parts that aren’t necessarily easy to come by since Lancia hasn’t sold anything in the U.S. in more than 40 years. The asking price is probably low enough for the right buyer to roll the dice and sell what happens.
I know absolutely zero about Lancia.
Other than they made some wicked looking rally cars over the years. 🏁
In Europe, these HPEs garnered a terrible reputation for rust in the engine mounts, such that the engine fell out after a very short period of time!! Buyer beware
james
That really only happened with the very earliest Beta berlinas (4-door fastback sedan/saloon), which had a design flaw in the rear mounts for the powertrain subframe where water could be trapped. After as little as one winter on heavily salted winter UK roads, that trapped salty water could rust away those mount points, allowing the engine to droop at the rear.
Lancia already corrected that flaw by the time the coupe, HPE and spider variants went into production. Not to say they were rust-free, but hardly much worse than other cars of the era. But since Lancia did the right thing in acknowledging the problem and offered a buyback of those earliest affected berlinas, the UK press savaged Lancia and gave them an exaggerated reputation for rust that they never really recovered from, such that the UK variants of the last-gen Delta had to be badged as a Chrysler. “No good deed goes unpunished…”
Ah, the subtle distinction between “gained a reputation” and “actually affected by said recall.”
You are so right. Wicked performing, as well!
Lancia in Europe in general maintains an upmarket reputation at least among Italian cars and the HPE maintained this reputation as a family car with sporty ambitions.
Great drivers car but my god here in Europe you could literally here these rust, they could be that bad in as little as three years in the UK they were removed from sale for around 18 months the worst 2 I personally came across were a 5 year old one that the steering column came a way from the dash with a check still attached & another where the complete rear wheel tub Inc suspension broke away from the shell, the later was one of the “improved” rustproofing,fiats & Alfa suds were similarly effected.
I wouldn’t mind one with a check still attached…
Looks like a beta coupe in the background. Both great cars back in the day
It was a no cost factory option for the US to SHIP them with rust!
We turbocharged a Scorpion version of one of these back in the early eighties. Same drivetrain but located in the back. It was pretty quick in its time.
I owned a Zagato, (Targa Lancia Beta). My neighbor had it and left it in his yard where it sank up to the body in mud. He gave it to me when I was 18. Got it running, swapped out a rusted fender and got a $99 Earl Scheib red paint job. These are both great and horrible cars. Italian quality at their worst while great Italian design. I sold it before too long as every time I hit a bump, my head hit the targa bar. not designed for a 6’3″ guy but I didn’t realize that problem till I got it running and driving.
Someone very brave could take this on and invest twice as much as it would be worth to minimally restore it into a respectable driver. But what makes even this unlikely is that this example was ordered with an automatic. I mean, who orders a Lancia with an auto? Sad.
There’s a reason these were only offered with the autotragic for one year only, at least in the US market tho’ I don’t think it was offered much longer abroad. Developed in cooperation with Automotive Products in the UK, apparently with many similarities to the unit AP developed for the Mini and BMC 1100/1300 (ADO16), AP abandoned the transmission market midway through development, leaving Lancia to finish the job and manufacture it themselves.
As such, these autos can be tricky to maintain, as it’s an obscure design nearly nobody is at all familiar with outside the UK (and even there, familiarity with the related Mini/BMC units is waning), seal/rebuild kits hard hard to find, etc. Any problems with the auto trans might be simpler to resolve with a swap to the 5-speed, tho’ I don’t know how straightforward such a swap may or may not be.
More about that AP transmission, tho’ the Lancia variant was only a 3-speed and apparently used conventional ATF separate from the engine oil supply:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_automatic_transmission
I do not know why, but back in the early 90’s when selling parts for the HPE, it got the nickname “Buffalo” . Yes, in general not the most desireable car, but there was a following.
The corrosion problems of the early Betas appears to have been corrected on later production. I bought a new 1977 Lancia Beta Berlina off the dealer’s showroom floor. The car survived 12 years of daily driving, including on salted Northeast winter roads. The fiberglass/plastic wheel well liners did their job keeping rust at bay. The undercarriage and panels were in V.G. condition when I sold the Beta to a Lancia collector in Missouri, although some surface rust was beginning to show on the bottom of the rear fenders behind the wheel wells.
Unfortunately, the 1756cc engine was underpowered due to EPA regulations requiring exhaust gas recirculation (in any species other than amoebas, that would be a nasty perversion). Thanks to Al Consentino’s (FAZA) instructions, the engine was de-smogged and a different Weber carb fitted to improve performance, fuel mileage and enjoyment.
A dealer parts guy had difficulty verifying the VIN for a parts order. He was told that my car was part of a small batch originally built for the Austrian market but retrofitted at the factory to U.S. specs thus out of sequence VIN wise for the U. S. market.
The emissions-nerfed power of ’70s Fiats and Lancias for the US market was mostly due to reduced compression, undersized carburetors (and for ’79 only, a more turbulent intake manifold), a more restrictive 4-into-1 exhaust manifold (vs. the 4-2-1 manifold used elsewhere), addition of a catalytic converter (the early pebble-bed type being more restrictive than the modern ceramic-honeycomb type), and possibly altered cam timing (I’m not sure this has ever been conclusively confirmed).
EGR doesn’t really affect performance much, and contrary to popular opinion, it isn’t really meant to “reburn” residual hydrocarbons in the exhaust (that’s what secondary air induction/injection is for, adding fresh air to the exhaust stream). Rather, it’s meant to reduce combustion temperatures by diluting the intake charge with inert gases that don’t really affect the fuel:oxygen ratio, to reduce NOx emissions that form at high temperatures.
The rest of the “emissions equipment” didn’t affect power much either (even the “smog pump” for secondary-air injection only saps about 1/2 hp), and much of it didn’t have much to do with emissions but, rather, improving drivability in various special-case scenarios with a woefully undercompressed and undercarbureted engine.
Automatic? Oh, well…
Lancias went to hell in a relatively short time after Fiat took over, except for the rally cars. If you want a real Lancia, find a pre-Fiat model.
If only it wasn’t painted gold. I’d give it a shot.
Or equipped with a slush-box.
fiat made a deal with russia to buy steel as payment for the lada factory. i were a lousy deal for fiat and their costumers1
Fiat used the Russian steel mainly for Alphasud models. Rust in these cars was phenomenal and demanded an investigation. It was revealed that they rusted inside out and not the other way around as usual, due to the existence of small rust nucleus that survived the hot liquid process of the recycled steel. They stopped using it after that but Alphasuds got a nasty reputation for unstoppable rust.
Fun fact: There’s actually zero historical evidence that the “Russian steel” trope is true. Note the flaw in this particular retelling — Fiat didn’t control Alfa Romeo until 1986, so even if they had done a deal for Russian steel to be used in Lancias in the ’70s, it wouldn’t have found its way into the the Alfasud. (I think if you actually dig into primary source material, you’ll find that process failings in Alfa’s Naples plant meant that various internal cavities in the cars’ structure had paint/coating omitted.)
Indeed Joe, and those investigating the “Russian steel” trope have found that, aside from the process failures you mention, another contributor to rust was the frequent labor strikes in Italy during that era, which often allowed bare stampings or entire bodyshells to sit exposed to the elements for extended periods of time before they ever hit the primer and paint stages of manufacture.
That would also handily explain why some individual cars suffered rust and/or reliability issues sooner and/or worse than others, depending on exactly when each particular car was assembled and how badly or not that assembly was disrupted by strikes for how long and at what stage(s).
I red this story about the ‘Russian steel’ 30 years back more or less. It may be false but another incident makes me sceptical. About 17 years ago i bought an electric kitchen made in a northern EU country neighbouring Russia. One of its stoves, the smaller one for coffee, kept rusting. I used a strong antirust agent i use for my vintage car but brown spots kept blowing up. After many tries i gave up the fight, covered it with white antirust and stopped using the stove, now a color blend of white (agent) and brown (rust).