Either wheaters or Elvis Payne said the drivers of those Robins intentionally exaggerated their driving movements to make sure they rolled over.
Z
It was me. Was it staged? Of course it was. Some of my friends appeared in the Top Gear programme that clip was made for. They were asked to be there, as members of the Reliant owners Club.
The TV company mechanics ballasted the car and even fitted a larger wheel on one side of the rear axle to unsettle it. They also fitted a roll cage and replaced the fuel tank with a small fuel cell. Clarkson was exaggerating his inputs to make it roll and I think he always rolled it onto the same side.
The people who "just happened to be walking by" were all minor celebrities, btw.
Many hundreds of thousands of those cars were made. If people drove them sensibly they were safe enough. The problem comes when the driver brakes hard and tries to swerve. As Scotty in Star Trek said, "Ye canna change the laws of physics, Jim".
I'd think the Elio should be stable enough in reverse, provided the driver didn't do something very silly, bearing in mind that the engine is located between the two wheeled axle, rather than over the single wheel, which is a more stable configuration than the Reliant three wheelers have.
The chap with no front teeth in that video is Steve White. He is a very nice chap who has suffered major personal health issues over the last few years. If that wasn't enough, his father was tragically killed last year in a freak accident; a tree fell on his mobility scooter in their local park. Some people have no luck.