Exploring Your Suggestions For Cars That Different Brands Should Have Built

There are some things that just should have been made by someone else. Intentions were good with the original, but others had the skills to do it better. This happens with music all the time; songs like Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower or Johnny Cash doing Hurt could arguably be considered improvements over the original. You might not even know that Scent Of A Woman and Ocean’s 11 were remakes, but you’d likely find them more watchable than the originals.

With cars, it’s fun to think about what models might have possibly been better had they been made by other makes entirely than the ones that actually built them. The same car under a different brand could have been poised to reach more buyers or built to a more resolved state. Great styling might have been matched by outstanding mechanicals had a car been built elsewhere, or the other way around. We posed this very question in an Autopian Asks a little while back, and you readers and us writers all had opinions, most of them pretty thought provoking. However, the proof is in the pudding, and there were a few that I wanted to take a bit further to see what they might have possibly looked like. Now that you can actually see an approximation of what was asked for, do we still stand by your suggestions? Let’s take a look.

Along Came A…

The reborn Fiat 124 Spider was a collaboration between Mazda and Stellantis that resulted in what was essentially a rebodied and tweaked Miata ND. Introduced in 2016, this Fiat/Miata actually sold well enough at first, but quickly dropped off people’s radar and ceased production less than four years later.

Commenter AlfaWhiz suggested that the Fiat/ Mazda mashup never should have been sold as a Fiat. He thought this group effort car should have been an Alfa; big surprise based on this reader’s handle:

The fact is that the sports car from Mazda/Fiat Group partnership was initially going to be branded as an Alfa Romeo, but then-FCA leader and force of nature Sergio Marchionne decreed that anything with an Alfa badge would only be made in Italy. That’s a bold move to protect the integrity of a brand but likely doomed the reimagined Mazda sports car to an early death.

Contrary to what Jack Trade says, I know that some people of a certain age remember and love the 124 Spider, as do I, and I like the reboot (as do 1978fiatspyderfan and our Carlos Ferreira). Still, for whatever reason the name “Fiat” in the US seems to have always been associated with small economy cars, and in the seventies the association also included rust and poor reliability (not that other European cars were or still are better- looking at your VW product in my garage). On the other hand, despite that fact that they made everyman rides like the Alfasud overseas, Alfa Romeo has almost always been viewed stateside as just a step or two below Ferrari and Maserati. As Jack mentions, from its appearance in the 1967 film The Graduate (aped in Waynes World II) to being the car purchased by the ill-fated dad for one of the Menendez brothers, the 1966-94 Alfa Spider is often seen as playthings for the well-to-do.

If a car company doesn’t capitalize on such an image, I have no sympathy for them. Also, the Alfa might not have been any more capable than the original Fiat rival on the road (both 4 cylinder/live axle products), but the old Alfa Spider was also arguably better looking (or at least looked more like an “exotic”).

The Alfa Spider in its earliest and latest forms was a cleaner shape, and it might translate well to the Miata. Here’s a rough idea of what that might have looked like:

The original Alfa Spider outlasted the 1966-85 Fiat Spider by nearly a decade when it finally ended production in 1994. Maybe if Mazda had put an Alfa costume on the Miata instead of a Fiat one, they’d still be selling it today? I’ll tell you one thing- branded as an Alfa Romeo the Fiat Group could have easily charged $5000 or more for it; such is the value of a name for when people ask “what do you drive?”

Mister Fiero

Scott Ross and 4jim shared a common thought from many enthusiasts about Pontiac’s star-crossed mid-engined sports car.

Indeed, that was the quandary of the day back in 1984. The first Toyota MR2 was a far, far better car than the original Fiero by almost any measure, particularly when compared to the Iron Duke 4 cylinder powered one with the Chevette front suspension.

So why not just buy that? Well, the angular brand language of Toyota in the early eighties looked great on the Celica and Supra, but somehow the first MR2 didn’t wear it as well. Certainly, it had its charms, and I don’t agree with those that claim it resembles Paul Bunyon’s lawn mower without the handle, but it really does lack in the way of sex appeal. What good is a sports car if you have to buy it in spite of its appearance?

The Fiero did have the looks that made you want to buy, so let’s imagine what a Toyotified Pontiac P-Car might have looked:

The Pontiac was about six inches longer which helped to make it look less stubby than the Mister 2 (and helped to accommodate big corn-fed American humans and their cargo). Damn, I still love that wheel design Toyota used on a number of cars. I added a steeper fastback similar to the later Fiero GT (and later Toyota MR2) with bigger quarter windows. I was envisioning those being real rear quarter windows and a wraparound Ferrari-style backlight (as seen on an El Camino too!); I was never a fan of the blacked-off fake window panels of the early Fiero (the red car below) or the outside-of-the-car windows of the later GT models (the gold car):

Of course, looking at recent Lotus models maybe I’d be happy enough with just a Toyota motor in the back of a Fiero instead; why couldn’t NUMMI have made this instead of the Corolla-based Nova?

Alright Alright Alright

Our own Thomas Hundal had an interesting proposition for using GM’s latest EV architecture:

Commenter Col Lingus was down with that:

Indeed, that Caddy seems pretty nice but what about the great unwashed masses that buy cars? Don’t they deserve some of this goodness?

With mid-sized GM A-bodies in the sixties, they wrote songs about the Pontiac GTO and the Oldsmobile Cutlass 442 got the glitz. Meanwhile, the equivalent Chevelle SS396 and 454 went about their business of offering no-frills budget performance for the masses quietly, or at least as quietly as a big Chevy V8 could.

The Dodge Charger has become a modern-day legend thanks to appearances in everything from Bullitt to Dukes of Hazzard and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, so the hype surrounding the new EV model has caused quite a stir. Still, Thomas makes a good point in that GM has the goods in their new Ultium platform to make a world-beating EV muscle machine. Stripping some of the fluff out of something like that expensive Cadillac could create a more basic but brutally fast no-nonsense mid-sized sedan to attack the likes of the Charger head-on. This new Chevelle SS/EV would trade things like Stellantis’s silly kiddy-ride noise-and-shake fake-ICE-motor shenanigans for pure performance.

Can the Ultium platform make something as low as a typical car? I wasn’t sure so I started with a Chevelle as a tall sedan/crossover type vehicle similar to the Lyriq:

That’s fine, but Thomas seems to think that GM could possibly make something lower; the batteries in the platform can be turned sideways instead of vertically to reduce height. He’d like to see a sort of latter-day-seventh-generation Camaro in two- or four-door hatch form that looks like the vaunted fastback 1968-72 Chevelle SS as driven by everyone’s favorite Matthew McConaughey movie character. He gets older, the Chevy stays the same age (such is the proof of Matthew’s craft that he made such a sort-of-sleazy guy so likeable).

You don’t need to ask me twice to make something that’s a car and not a crossover:

In back, EVs still look odd without exhaust pipes so I’ve added what looks like muffler tips that are really the backup lights (amber signals in place of the 1969 model’s backup lamps).

If the rear drive Lyriq has 340 horsepower and the dual-motor model has 500, that means we can get economies of scale and just put that rear motor up front as well to get 680 ponies, right? Maybe not, but the war is on and the bowtie has to bury that Charger.

As sound as Thomas’s reasoning is to me, it’s unlikely that General Motors will build such a thing. Be a lot cooler if they did.

Soobie Saab Story

Was he complimenting the Mazda/Jaguar mashup that I offered up (I mean, Ford had a stake in both at the time), or the Lancia-branded Allante I suggested some time ago? I’m not sure, but I started to think more about that ill-fated SVX I suggested.

What Cars Would Have Turned Out Better If Different Brands Had Built Them? – The Autopian

Our Daydreaming Designer Imagines The Nightmares That Could Have Happened If Dead GM Brands Survived – The Autopian

What It Might Have Looked Like If Iacocca Had Made A Full Range Of Lamborghini Models Based On Cheap Chryslers – The Autopian

A Daydreaming Designer Looks At How Rebadging Might Have Saved Some Automotive Failures – The Autopian