A Brief History of Retro-Mobiles

Jamie Lincoln Kitman breaks down the car world's obsession with remakes, rebirths, and rehashes.

The Real Retros
Some things never change, including these cars.

Land Rover Defender

Land Rover Defender
The most basic of Land Rovers has evolved much since its direct ancestor's debut in 1948, but it's also stayed a lot the same. One of the world's most long-lived automotive icons, it's fresh from a turn in the new Bond film and still bouncing down the road. A replacement is planned for 2016, but we can't imagine a satisfactory one.

Hindustan Ambassador
Still in production in India 53 years after England's Morris Motors stopped making it, the Amby remains beloved on the streets of both these two intertwined lands. Though rarely seen in the UK, where appalling performance, handling, and safety could be seen as liabilities, it still graces Indian new-car showrooms.

Mercedes Benz Gelandewagen

Mercedes Benz Gelandewagen
Designed with the personal help of the Shah of Iran, it may handle like a 1970s German personnel carrier, and it may be priced like a small airplane, but it's more authentic than a dozen MLs, and if a glance around the chichi shopping districts of Beverly Hills and New York are any indication, it's in no danger of going anywhere

Volkswagen Kombi

Volkswagen Kombi
Down in Brazil, where the safety laws are presumably a hell of a lot more lax, VW is still peddling the Microbus, the Type 2 version they built in Germany off an old modified Beetle platform from 1967-1979. The air-cooled engine is gone, but it's still slower than slow, with a 1.4-liter four that recaptures its old-stager ancestors' lack of go.

Mini Cooper

Inspired by...
Based on long-running originals that were too good to go away, but not really good enough to stay.

Mini Cooper
It took more than 40 years to come up with a suitable replacement for the original Mini, a hugely important machine whose technical layout—transverse front-engine, front-wheel-drive, and a wheel at each corner—changed the way the world looked at cars. When BMW bought the company, it brought a lot of fine German engineering to the original concept, adding weight and blunting immediacy in the name of safety and longevity, but Mini is still a fine car broadly true to its original principles.

Fiat 500

Fiat 500
When looking to recreate its iconic 500 (1957-1975) Fiat had to throw away the old family recipe, which called for diminutive size, engine in the rear, and all the crash protection of a crush-proof box of Marlboros. A creditable bit of modern design, the new car manages to channel the original surprisingly well in spite of having adopted now-uniform transverse-engine, front-wheel drive layout and modern safety strategies. Like the Mini, it's a winner.

BMW Z8

BMW Z8
Endeavoring to reanimate the spirit of its limited-edition 507 of the 1950s, BMW launched the Z8, an exquisitely built and expensive tribute to an exquisitely built and expensive roadster from its past. An object lesson in how to use bespoke fittings and elegant design to leave the mass market far behind, even though they built more than 5,000 between 1999 and 2003, the Z8 must surely be a fine investment to hold.

Alfa Romeo Gran Sport Quattroruote

Alfa Romeo Gran Sport Quattroruote
Built to commemorate the great Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 Gran Sport sports racing cars of the 1930s, Alfa and longtime coachbuilding associate Zagato, to a challenge set by the Italian magazine Quattroruote: assembling a rolling tribute to the former car, using the mechanicals of a modern Alfa Giulia between 1965 and 1967. Weird and not nearly as pretty as the stunningly well-proportioned original, but we wouldn't kick it out of our motorhouse for leaking oil.

Morgan Three-Wheeler

Morgan Three-Wheeler
The tiny English independent is in the business of paying homage to itself—no car looked more like the 1930s than the firm's 4/4 roadster, which has been in continuous production since 1937 and only rarely updated. Then along came this three-wheeled thing, which brilliantly recalls the motorcycle-engine powered three-wheelers of Morgan's even-earlier past, made alarmingly quick today thanks to a Harley-inspiredtwo-liter V-twin.

Chevrolet SSR

The Pseudo-Retros
Somebody thought it would be a good idea to make a new car that looked like an old car. Some people bought them, but then they stopped, so then their makers killed them. They are the Few, the Proud, and the Dead.

Chevrolet SSR
Styled to ape the look of a '50s Chevy Pickup that's been aggressively hot-rodded, the SSR was, under its loud paintjobs and showy skin, one of the least "hot" rods ever, with the chassis and mechanicals of a blunderbuss sport ute, the Trailblazer. By the end of its four-year run in 2006, Chevy had addressed the SSR's power deficit, but it was too late. They had a pure bozo-mobile on their hands.

Plymouth Prowler

Plymouth Prowler
Shortly before they put a bullet in the Plymouth brand, Chrysler's long-running economy line was given this hard-to-figure halo model in 1997 to boost its ever-waning sex appeal. Foreshadowing the SSR that would come after it after it, Chrysler forgot to make it hot, foregoing a rorty V8 for a tepid V6 and the people spoke. Once the speculators and the car world's most ignorant poseurs were sated, sales petered out.

Chrysler PT Cruiser, Chevrolet HHR

Chrysler PT Cruiser, Chevrolet HHR
Best thought of in the same breath, as Chevrolet unabashedly ripped off Chrysler's idea for a light-hearted mini-minivan tribute to '50s surf wagons with economy car underpinnings, both of these models split public opinion—lots of love, lots of hate. They looked cute to some, weird to others, but mostly they drove like rental cars and in the end not enough people cared anymore. Hope expired, and both were quietly put down. Having spawned no progeny, we'll never know if the world could have sustained restyled versions.

Nissan Be-1, Pao, Figaro, and S-Cargo

Nissan Be-1, Pao, Figaro, and S-Cargo
The cars that started the modern retro wave arrived long before the New Beetle or the Mini. Nissan experimented with four limited-production retro-mobiles beginning in 1987 and ending in 1992, rolling out a Mini Cooper tribute (13 years before BMW) called the Be-1, a Citroen 2CV homage named Pao, an elegant miniature convertible, the Figaro, which remains a major fashion accessory in London, and the absurdist van-let, the S-Cargo. Their success—meeting modest sales targets and creating interest in Nissan—may well be seen to have been what unleashed all automotive retro that followed.

Siata Spring

Siata Spring
Inspired by what? The Alfa Quattroruote? The emergence of crappy fiberglass kits that enabled aesthetically challenged Americans to turn rusted-out, rear-engine Bugs into plastic abominations that looked vaguely like front-engine MG TDs? Some strong weed? We may never know what led the tiny sports car manufacturer to make a last-ditch effort to remain solvent in 1968 when it marketed the Spring. A separate-fendered tribute to sports cars past, it's more than a little goofy, with a prominent grille sitting uneasily upfront, given that it's a rear-engined car, based on Fiat 850 parts, pretending to have its engine in front. The nine-year-old in me just can't get over that

Excalibur

Excalibur
Retro must have been in the air and fine minds thought alike on two continents, for back in South Bend, Indiana, in 1964, design consultant Brooks Stevens borrowed a Lark chassis from his employers Studebaker and turned it into a rolling tribute to the 1928 Mercedes SSK (less strange than it seems; Studebaker had distributed Mercedes in the U.S. for many years.) He called it the Mercebaker. Studebaker went broke, but Stevens' sons would go on to sell what they called the Excalibur in 1966. Supplied with 327-cubic-inch Corvette V8s, Excaliburs were fast and rather sporting to begin, but by the time the firm ran out of steam in 1990, it was five "series" into retro-reimagination and the Excalibur had morphed into a vulgar rococo monstrosity that evinced the utmost in bad taste. As such, it became another case of a supremely poor automotive idea that went to inspire numerous even shittier copies