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
Here’s a much-appreciated kudos in the comments from NosrednaNod:
Thanks, NosrednaNod! Wait, what did I even say? Peter, the hardest working man at the Autopian, asked the staff to quickly throw out our own examples of shoulda-coulda-beens in ten minutes so let’s see what I crapped onto the keyboard:
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.
If I’m going to claim that it didn’t think it made sense as a Subaru, what do I think it would it work as? The oddball fighter-jet-canopy greenhouse, the thin slit of a grille in front, the general aero-over-mainstream-acceptance ethos of the design?
Wait a minute- the answer is obvious. The SVX needed to be a Saab.
That’s right. As a modern-day Sonett this thing looks just about perfect (and a lot like the EV-1 show car that Saab presented in 1985). Change a few details like installing the grille from a 9000, add 900 Turbo wheels and it’s hard to believe that this thing ever wasn’t a Saab in the first place.
Ironically, a few years later when GM owned Saab and 20 percent of Subaru’s parent company, they released the “Saabaru” rebranded Impreza WRX as the well-received Saab 9-2x. Reality imitates fiction
Amusing as it is to reimagine cars being made by possibly more appropriate companies, in some ways I’m glad that it often doesn’t happen.
It’s true; these oddballs are pure Autopian dream fuel. I love the absurd juxtaposition of personal luxury coupe with street-conquering power that is the Grand National. Volvo P1800s never would have been as durable had they been made with slicker twin-cam Italian underpinnings to match the sleek styling. The Allante probably indirectly helped to push Cadillac into a more international style.
Certain some cars might have been better had they been built elsewhere, or by others, but where would the fun have been in that?
What Cars Would Have Turned Out Better If Different Brands Had Built Them? – The Autopian
That Chevelle sedan is the business. I would buy that if it was put in production. (You listening GM?)
I’ll go farther and say the Camaro should have always had a sedan counterpart called the Chevelle after it was re-introduced in 2009.
I missed this segment,but the other day i was wondering what would’ve become of SAAB if the had made the Tesla model S instead of Tesla.
SVX Sonnett looks great but needs one minor change: The rear window needs the hockey stick swoop
I dunno, Porsche is a pretty successful company
Not a specific model, but AMC should have partnered with Subaru instead of Renault.
Love this! No doubt the other ND MX-5 should have been an Alfa. I’ve also always liked to imagine what could have happened if Saab had partnered with Hyundai/Kia to make a Veloster and Soul into new models (9-2 and 9-2x respectively?) to help pump up its line up after getting freed from GM instead of just being forced into death. Those both had the right roofline (high front peak, blacked out A-pillars) to be Saabs with the right front and rear reworking. Make the turbo engine standard and fill the interior with loaded Saaby bits and call it a day.
Not related, but because I clicked on the Under the Radar link for the Saab EV-1 concept (that confused me because it’s not an EV?), I learned that Ford did a concept in 1996 called the Indigo that was, on its surface, similar to the Plymouth Prowler. Upon closer inspection it was more akin to an Indy car than a hot rod, with a 435 hp 6.0L V12 mounted behind the seats, and it had the stupid requisite-for-a-concept-car Lambo doors. Uh, so a Prowler if made by Ford? But with none of the design language of Ford except for their interiors? There, a half-assed attempt to make it related, sorry.
I woulda loved to see them tackle my comment of “Anything Ford made” lol.
I owned a manual transmission 1986 MR2 for 17 years, so it is hard to be objective about the design. It was silver, but I’ve compensated for that with two green cars since then. I thought it looked better with the wing and the body-colored bumpers.
As a lifelong Pontiac man who counts a 1983 Celica GT with those exact wheels as one of his favorite cars he’s ever had, I fully approve of the 1984 Toyota Fiero. Next to the woeful Iron Duke, the 22R-E would have felt like a 2JZ. And in that tiny body, it may as well have been.
That Chevelle gives me tingles in my no-no bits.
That Alfa Spyder rendering has Z8 vibes and I dig it
I like a bunch of these. I didn’t have anything at the time of the original ask, but…
What if a squarish vaguely softroady thing with cool features like removable cooler and an available factory tent back, from the dawn of the age of squarish vaguely softroady things, was built by an actually off-roady company? Jeep Aztek!
Unlike the US, Europe gets a fine selection of modern Alfa Spiders to choose where to allocate your depreciation.
We did get the 916 Gtv/Spider and the Brera-based one, both of which were nice. It was a real bummer we didn’t get an Alfa version of the ND/124.
It could’ve taken cues from the 8c or 4c, which would look ace, but Bishop’s rendition also has potential.
Thanks for the feature!
That FieMR2 looks the business.
The front offset view of the Chevelle looks like a Jensen Interceptor.
The Saab looks like that’s how it ought to have been.
Oddly enough when I bought my 91 SVX in 2001, I first tried to get a hold of the seller of a Saab 9000 for 2 weeks before giving up on that car. It definitely looks like something Saab makes more than it a Subaru back then.
Remember that in 91-92 the most expensive Subaru other than the SVX was a Legacy wagon (this was pre-Outback and pre-flat 6 availability in sedans/wagons).
Yeah, and on top of that it seems like Subaru held on to their boxy styling longer than their contemporaries, but then go and make something sleek and curvy that didn’t look like anything else in their brand.
I really did like that car, other than the annual transmission rebuild part…
10/10 would daily that SAAB.
Fortunately I bought my SVX with a shady used car lot extended warranty and in 2 years they paid for a transmission rebuild 3 times after the center diff explodes like it always does. The cost of this ended up being more than I paid for the car + warranty and when it had 2 weeks left I bought myself a new RX8 and put it up for sale.
All of those Chevy’s are awesome.
Nice job on that MR2 giving it a Supra-style nose. Now give it the black hatch too and it’s all set.
The Alfa Miata, *Insert Fry take my money GIF*
I always preferred the Fiata design over the Miata. But what do I know, I have an NC2 and I think it looks fine.
Right, if it was an Alfa it would probably still had an identical interior and mechanicals set to the 124, but a better exterior. And I’d be willing to deal with the decrease in reliability of the 1.4T over the Mazda 2.0 if it was at least an Alfa Romeo. I’ve never been sold on the modern 124s looks though, the hips never meshed with the overall design, and it takes a lot to convince me a retro design on a modern car is a good idea. That said, I unabashedly love the Chevy SSR, so what do I know? (FWIW I love it because it’s so stupid and pointless, but it’s unique and optimistic while the HHR was just cynical)
The Fiata looks much better than the MiatAlfa. The MiatAlfa looks better than the Miata. By the same margin. Styling: Fiata > MiatAlfa > Miata.
It was the Fiat branding that killed the modern 124 Spider, not the styling. Alfa branding might have been a slightly better choice, but not by much.
Fiat has always been a sketchy product in the US. There has never been a good mainstream Italian brand in the US; only exotics. Everyone knows you need deep pockets to own an exotic, so nobody would’ve bought it as an Alfa any more than they did as a Fiat.
I dig the Chevelle. You can have the Cross if you need to, but make the SS a two door. Just make it a dumb car, with butt loads of EV power. No
fratzonicfart chambers needed. Give it just enough tech to have stupid things like burnout and drift modes and it just might work. It would fail as a software defined car.Indeed, same idea as the old SS. Sizeable 5 passenger vehicle, rental car level interior (at least in the base model) and maximum power allowed. You know where your money is going and that’s fine by you.
Two-door is a long-forgotten automotive form that really only exists in exotics now. Four-doors are also completely stigma-free in the minds of Millenials and Gen-Z- in fact, they’d consider a two-door “impractical”.
Just make it a four-door sedan.
that’s why I tried to hide the door handles so it’s basically a no-door car
As a Millennial, I still remember the 2006 Charger being controversial for being a 4-door [Rooster Teeth “Ow My Hip” skit plays].
the nice thing about those 1968-72 Chevelles is that you could get a pillarless hardtop version of both the two and four door so that there really wasn’t that large of a visual difference between the two.
My favorite of all the GM midsizers of that era is the 1970 Buick Skylark 4 door hardtop. I love them fender skirts.