I think my dad had one of those! Heh, he let me borrow it one time, and I drove it into work and the car started acting strange...especially when I slowed down the car at stop signs and would hear an odd rattling noise, and when I went around corners the car acted VERY strange.
I pulled the car over several times to examine the front end, but couldn’t see anything wrong.
When I pulled into the parking lot at work the odd handling was so pronounced with noise and the wheel jerking...when I got out, the front right tire was slanted at a 45 degree angle from the vertical, and there were two lug nuts holding it on, and both of those were ready to snap off.
Apparently, the rattling sound was due to the broken lug nuts that were motionless when the car was in motion due to the centrifugal force, but when you slowed, they all rattled as they fell to the bottom of the hub cap. And the weird handling going around corners was because the tire was ready to fall off!!!
Good heavens, that sounds mighty dangerous. Thank goodness you had no accident! :-)
But...maybe it was not due to a mechanical failure, i.e. the lugnuts - or maybe yes? Could they simply have been weak, because they had been made of iron of inferior quality?
I have heard of such or similar mechanical faults at the time, since many cars in the Seventies did indeed suffer from quality issues (I must confess cases that in many I don’t know exactly why).
Volkswagen, as well as Alfa Romeo, had terrible problems with rust for several years, since they had been buying sheet steel from the Soviet Union, and rustproofing of car-bodies was still a far cry from what it is today.
I still remember quite a few people at the time, that, in terms of quality and passive safety, there was either Mercedes-Benz or the rest. My folks used to drive Mercs, the (then) smaller ones, and as plain and boxy as they were and looked, they were really solidly constructed and built, and they never failed to proceed.
How are the mighty fallen! :-(