Endangered family favourites to save now

Nick Larkin’s top ten picks

Imagine you had a couple of giant pandas – of the cute black and white animal variety, not the minimalist Fiat – as pets. You would see pandas every day and end up liaising with zoos and other panda owners. Your life would be panda-filled. They wouldn’t be a novelty.

However, the latest official panda census (we suspect the world’s pandas got sick of people with clipboards knocking on their doors all the time) suggests that there are just 1864 in the world and 300 in captivity.

It’s the same in the classic car world – some cars that were once common street furniture are now desperately near extinction. The Vauxhall Cavalier Antibes is believed to have gone completely.

Frequent appearances at shows – including the Grampian Transport Museum’s excellent How Many Left show, which takes place at the Aberdeenshire attraction on 21 May – create the illusion that there are far more survivors than there really are. The reality is that our collective minds haven’t really adjusted to the fact that cars we used to see every day of the week have all-but disappeared. Now, surely, is the time to save them.

The ten classics considered here are very much on the endangered list, despite once being the sort of car you wouldn’t give a second glance to, but there are many more others in jeopardy too.

Isn’t it about time more of us gave a home to these increasingly rare beasts?