Whatever Happened to Small Cars? Visit European Cityscapes and See...

In July 2023, Fiat CEO Olivier Francois announced that Fiat would no longer be offering grey cars. This praiseworthy rebellion against blandness* was announced in a video of a 600e being dipped in a vat of orange paint. Sadly, it occurred 2 model years after Fiat stopped offering its 500L sedan and 124 Spider, victims of the SUV craze in the US. The 500x crossover is still on sale here, and the little 500e all-electric coupe is still available in Europe, though the plaid color scheme shown here is apparently not a factory offering...

But red was, of course, a factory offering from Alfa Romeo on its front-drive Giulietta, a small family hatchback offered from 2010 to 2020. Only the larger Giulia sedan and Stelvio SUV were part of the company's US relaunch, which began with the 8C Competizione supercar in 2008. Too bad, because the Giulietta would have offered practicality and Alfa handling in a city-friendly size.

Alfa's 159, offered as 4-door sedan starting in 2004 and a 5-door sport wagon joined it in 2006.  On a 106" wheelbase, it's not small, but the design by Giugiaro and Alfa's Centro Stile is too pretty to ignore. Engine options included inline 4s with and without turbocharging, as well as Alfa's 3.2 liter V6.  Like contemporary BMW sport wagons, the 159 looks stunningly low and svelte when parked near today's big SUVs.  It was never imported into the US, and was discontinued in 2011.

Audi has offered its A1 in 3 and 5 door hatchback versions in Europe since 2010, but never in the US, where their recent emphasis, even in the electric E-trons, has been on SUVs.  The A1 is a posh supermini, offering gasoline engines ranging from 1.0 to 2.0 liters.  Intriguingly, transmission choices have included 5 and 6-speed manuals, a 7-speed S-tronic, and a 1-speed for the electric E-tron version.  

BMW offered its 1 Series in this F20 three-door version starting in 2012, and continued the model through 2019, eventually adding a 3.0 liter six to the original, more modest engine range, which included a 1.5 liter turbocharged inline three, plus 1.6 and 2.0 liter inline fours (turbocharged and not).  Transmissions included a 6-speed manual and 8-speed automatic, and the styling by Nicolas Huet was sleeker than the 1 Series notchback that made it to the US.

Citroen took a nonconformist approach when they introduced their C4 Cactus subcompact SUV in 2014.   Front-drive only, the Cactus offered 1.2 liter inline 3-cylinder gas power, or a 1.6 liter diesel four.  On a 102" wheelbase, it's a tidy 163" long.  Those black panels on the flanks, front and rear are called "AIrBumps".  They protect the C4 from parking lot dings and dents, in exchange for looking like AirBumps.  The Cactus was produced in Spain until 2020, and in Brazil from 2018 until the present.  Front-drive naturally, but sadly not with the famous hydropneumatic suspension, which would have allowed adjustable ground clearance, a practical feature in an SUV...

On a 5" shorter wheelbase than the Cactus, CItroen's DS3 is based on the same chassis platform, competing in the luxury supermini category with Audi's A1.  It's an inch longer than the Opel Tigra at 155 inches,  Launched as a Citroen in 2009, the car became part of the separate DS (pronounced de-esse, goddess in French) make in 2016, and continued for another three years. DS3 listed 1.2 liter inline threes, and 1.4 liter and 1.6 liter fours, with the 1.2 and 1.6 offering optional turbos. 

Opel's Karl (oddly named after Adam Opel's son) was built in South Korea, and was, like the Vauxhall Viva, a badge-engineered version of the 4th generation Chevy Spark. It was in the mini category (the BMW version, not the BMC) on a 93.9" wheelbase, and just over 12 feet long. Power came from a 1.0 liter inline 3, and 5-speed manual and automatics transmitted power from the front wheels to the road.  It all came to an end after 2017, when GM sold Opel to PSA (Peugeot-Citroen) Group, which joined Stellantis in 2021.

The Opel mini wagon below appears related to the equally boxy Concept A that appeared in 1999, and seemed aimed at maximum space efficiency...

Opel had offered its TIgra convertible with removable hardtop from 2004-2009, and this version was actually built in France, like the bodies for the Opel GT had been in the late 60s and early 70s.  A front-driver with 1.4 and 1.6 liter inline fours, it offered 5-speed manual as well as 4-speed automatic shifting.  It offered the right size for small car fans: at 154.4 inches on a 95.6" wheelbase, it was 2" shorter than Mazda's original Miata...

The Toyota Aygo (pronounced "I go") was a Euope-only model built in the Czech Republic alongside the related Citroen C1 and Peugeot 107. It was a true mini, with on overall length of 134" and weight just over 1,800 lb..  Engines were a 1.3 liter gas inline 3 and a 1.4 liter diesel 4. Aygo had a long production life, 2005-2022, and previewed some of the wild lighting and graphic shapes that appeared on Toyota's US market cars, especially SUVs.

VW's third-generation Scirocco, offered from 2008-17, offered 1.4 and 2.0 liter inline 4s as well as diesels, and standardized 6-speed manual gearboxes under this sleek and compact hatchback coupe shell by Walter de Silva.  Produced in Germany and Portugal, it was available only in front-drive form, perhaps to avoid competition with Audi's Quattro performance offerings.

VW's ID.3 offers electric power in a more compact form than the ID.4 we get in the US, at 167.8" long vs. 180.5" for the ID.4.  Weight is lower too, with the standard version ID.3 at 3,907 lb., while the ID.4 goes from 4,300 to 4,900 lb. depending upon configuration and trim.  ID.3 range runs from 240 to 330 miles, depending upon battery pack.   

VW's new ID.2 is still more compact, with an overall length of 159.4" on a 102.4" wheelbase, a range of up to 280 miles.  VW's target weight for the ID.2 is 3,300 to 3,500 pounds, according to Motor Trend magazine.  In the US market, this car could fill the gap left by Nissan's planned discontinuation of the Leaf, and GM's stopping Bolt EV and EUV production after 2023.  GM has now announced a new, revised Bolt EUV for next year, and Nissan is making noise about a new Leaf.  Good for American consumers, because we're unlikely to see the ID.2 on these shores anytime soon.

There's also a GTI version of the ID.2, with 265 hp instead of the standard 233.  The GTI, shown below, offers different trim and bumpers, front and rear, but it's unlikely to appear in the US market because of the US fondness for big SUVs*, and the Trump Administration's fondness for tariffs.

If the new tariffs being levied against imported cars make it unlikely that we'll see Volkswagen's ID.3 or ID.2 (let alone the smaller ID.1) in the US, it's even less likely that we'll see the new Peugeot E-208, a new all-electric slightly smaller than the ID.2, and with a range up to 254 miles.  PSA Group had mentioned plans to relaunch Peugeot in the US before joining Stellantis in 2021, and even mentioned 2026 as a target.  But French products, like German ones, will be affected by that 25% tax.  Oddly, Russian automotive products will be exempt.  In case you want to rush out and buy a Lada, though, you can forget it; Russian cars don't meet US safety standards.  There still are Federal safety standards for cars in the US, and they're supposed to be enforced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. We checked...

*Footnote:  

The Fiat announcement dropping grey occurred almost 2 years after we complained about the colorlessness of modern cars in "Worst Car Designs Revisited: Computerized Conformism + Fear of Color", posted here on June 20, 2021.  We reviewed the current SUV craze in "Annals of Design: Why So Many SUVs and Pickups" on November 30, 2023.

Color Photo Credits:  

All photos were contributed by our European correspondent Dr. Marcus Nashelsky, except for the VW ID.2 and ID.2 GTI (from Volkswagen AG on Wikimedia) and the Peugeot E-208 (from Stellantis N.V.).  In case you want to apply for that European correspondent's job, we'll point out that the hourly rate we offer for photography is zero, and that Dr. Nashelsky pays all his own travel expenses.

 

Two for the Road: Different Cars Mark the Eras of a Marriage

Director Stanley Donen's "Two for the Road" was released in late April 1967, right before the Summer of Love, but it reflected the concerns of a generation a decade older than the Flower Power crowd. At the same time, it served as a template for later road movie comedies, adopting nonlinear storytelling and sharp, witty, sometimes profane dialogue.  The musical themes, their tone reflective of a look into the past, were penned by Henry Mancini. If there's a more qualified candidate for our "Cars in Movies" series, we haven't seen it. The film begins with Mark Wallace (Albert Finney), a successful architect, and his wife Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) as they fly to France for a Riviera tour in their Mercedes 230SL. They reminisce about their previous trips to this coast, and what those trips have meant to them...

The cars mark the different eras in their summers and lives as students and later as a married couple.  They meet during a 1954 trip, first when Joanna rescues architecture student Mark's passport on the ferry from England, and later when the VW microbus carrying Joanna's choir is run off the road on the way to a music fest.  Mark comes to the rescue, but the choir (except for Joanna) comes down with chicken pox, and Mark and Joanna decide to hitchhike...

The hitchhikers find things to argue about, and eventually an Alfa driver picks up Joanna, but leaves  Mark by the roadside.  This is one of the few anachronisms in the car chronology.  The Bertone-bodied Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint was new in spring of 1954, but not this Giulia 1600 version with the big tail lights, from 1963.  Not long after this scene, the couple are reunited at the roadside, and in a scene at the beach, Joanna tells Mark she hates him.  He suggests they get married, and she agrees.

As the story develops, director Donen reinforces the irony and maintains the comic tone by using quick jumps forward and back in time.  This allows him to underline how the protagonists have changed, and to heighten the contrasts between the characters and their approaches to life.  These conflicts reach a hilarious boiling point in the 1957 trip, when Mark and Joanna, now married two years, share a new Ford Country Squire with Mark's ex-girlfriend Cathy, her husband Howard and their spoiled brat of a daughter Ruthie...

The American Maxwell-Manchesters are prototype permissive parents, spouting Freudian psychobabble at each other and at Mark and Joanna.  The Wallaces abandon the Maxwell-Manchesters not long after this scene, which follows a sequence where Ruthie throws a tantrum and pitches the car keys into the grass, stranding the party in their Ford at the roadside into the night...

The English couple finally gets to take a trip in their own car in 1959, when they bring this perky but hard-to-start 1950 MG-TD.  This was before product placement played such a big part in the production design of films...

But if they'd read the script of "Two for the Road", the minions of Morris Garages, now part of BMC, might have paid a ransom to keep this product of theirs off camera.  The couple's MG beings to make a funny noise on the way south, and eventually bursts into flame.    

This disaster paves the way for a critical plot turn, when the Dalbrets, a wealthy French couple, rescue the Wallaces and take them in this Bentley S1 to their seaside retreat at the Cote d' Azur.  Monsieur Dalbret introduces Mark to his Greek business partner, and this leads to a series of architectural commissions.  

A couple of years later it also leads to a solo trip to France for architect and new dad Mark, who has a fling with a blonde named Simone driving a blue Renault Floride. Lke many developments in this prototype road movie, the affair is presaged by a scene on a winding two-lane, when the two literally make passes at each other.  The red '61 Triumph Herald is Mark's new ride.  In summer of '63, the Wallaces go again to the Riviera and bring their young daughter Caroline. Mark is absorbed with work, and Joanna has an affair with David, a brother-in-law of client Dalbret.  A moment of truth occurs when Joanna returns to Mark, and he asks her why she has given up on David.   She replies, "He's too serious."  And this points out a theme of the story; Mark and Joanna are never so serious that they cannot laugh at themselves, or each other.

At fleeting moments in the story, the young couple on the roadside gets passed by their older, possibly wiser and certainly more prosperous selves. Towards the end of their "current" (1967) trip to Europe, Mark and Joanna have an argument in the Mercedes which, like this movie's quick cuts and sudden flashbacks and flash forwards, echoes French New Wave films, as well as dialogues between existentialists in Beat Generation cafés.  "What would you do if I didn't exist?" asks Mark.  Joanna replies, "I'd probably marry David."  When he says she's made his point, she replies, "But you do exist." 

The running gag of Mark misplacing his passport is repeated at the film's conclusion, when the couple stop at the Italian border control to present their documents.  Mark, nervous about making a meeting in Rome with another high-profile client, begins to panic, but Joanna quietly places the passport on the SL's steering wheel.  "Bitch", he says.  "Bastard", she replies.  In a movie marked by a consistent comic tone from start to finish, the viewer can assume this couple will continue their own comic interplay in the many miles (well, kilometers) ahead of them.

Photo Credits:  

Top and 2nd from bottom:  20th Century Fox

Remainder:  IMCDB.org (Internet Movie Cars Database)

Book Review: A Walk Around the Halls - Volume II (6 Decades of Motor Shows)

I just received a copy of the new book shown above, featuring six decades of amateur photos focused on car shows from the UK, USA, Europe and Japan.  The cover shot is by Ron Budde, who was my college roommate during our year in Versailles in 1970-'71. Ron's photos of our visit to the Paris Salon de l'Auto from October 1970 were good enough that when I posted them on this blog* they caught the attention of Lewis Mitchell at Motor Show Publishing in the UK.  A car enthusiast who has been obsessed with motor shows since childhood, Mr. Mitchell has collected decades of images from amateur photographic efforts and published them in 3 books, including this latest one.  

The book takes us through the Fifties and a decade into the present century, and just before the middle there's a 7-page spread with Ron Budde's photos documenting our experience at that long-ago show. The chapters are organized chronologically, and locations are highlighted, so you know whether you're wandering through exposition halls in Paris, London, Geneva, or Detroit. There are color shots of exotics like the Lamborghini Miura above and the Maserati Ghibli below, and shots of concept cars and specials from 1950 onwards, but one of the most intriguing things about the collection is that there are cars that this writer, who after all has the gumption to post a blog series called "Forgotten Classics", has never seen before. For example, there's a Bertone-bodied Borgward in the Fifties section that we'd missed even though we did a post on Borgward racers, and numerous glimpses of automotive oddities and exotica that show up in strips of  black and white shots at a smaller scale than color shots like these.

In his role as author and editor, Mr. Mitchell gives special attention to standout designs like the Abarth Biposto below.  Bodied by Bertone to a design by Franco Scaglione in 1952, the car incorporated some of the themes that would appear a year later on the first of three Bertone BAT show cars for Alfa Romeo.  On the cars selected for special attention, the author provides text with model names and histories, often including mechanical notes and even some production figures.  

This book is an enchanting journey down Memory Lane, until you run into something you don't recall at all.  I need to admit that this book was my first exposure to Toyota's RV-2.  I'd never heard anything about it, despite the fact that Toyota apparently went out of its way to publicize this one-off show car.  It displayed an unlikely split personality, first as a GT sports wagon (130 hp. six, 5-speed) and then as a camper with fold-out living space.  A bit like that Seventies Saturday Night Live commercial about the All-Purpose Substance: "It's a dessert topping, but you can use it as a floor wax."  Still, one has to admit the RV-2 has a kind of zany appeal.

Among the other unknown and / or forgotten delights was the Saab Aero-X below, from 2006. This concept car appeared 6 years after General Motors acquired full ownership of the Swedish car maker (they'd bought 50% in 1989).  GM claimed the carbon fiber bodied, AWD one-door coupe with turbocharged V6 power was a forecast of their new Scandinavian design language for the company...

One door?  Well, as the photo below shows, the design traded conventional entry and exit for a raised canopy that allowed 180-degree vision, but might not have made for an easy exit in a rollover, or allowed for easy production.  In that it was like the one-piece canopy on GM Styling's Corvair Monza GT show car from 1962.  Three years after Aero-X appeared, the Great Recession sent GM into bankruptcy, and Saab went the way of the Corvair.  

"A Walk Around the Halls - Vol. II" is in 6" x 8.5" format, with 191 pages of photos and text, plus fold-out covers with color images.  It was printed in the UK on paper sourced from FSC-certified forests.  It is available from Motor Show Publishing Ltd.; their complete catalog can be viewed by visiting www.motorshowphotos.co.uk. 

*Footnote: 

Ron Budde's car show photos appeared here on April 21, 2021 in "Lost Roadside Attraction: 70s Car Show on Paris Streets, and in the Parc des Expos."  After Lewis Mitchell contacted us about Ron's photos, we checked in with Ron, and he supplied more great shots for "Lost Roadside Attraction Sequel:  1970 Salon d l'Auto at the Parc des Expos", which we posted July 12, 2024.

Photo Credits:  

Top:  Motor Show Publishing Ltd. (photo by Ronald Budde)

2nd & 3rd:  Ronald Budde

4th:  Gruppo Bertone

5th:  Toyota Motors Corporation

6th & bottom:  Wikimedia

Chicago Story: Reclaiming a Stolen Volvo, and Discovering a Masterpiece Album

"Good music is beyond category."

                                                                                                   Duke Ellington

It was springtime in 1973. Sometime in the previous fall I'd decided to share a big Old Town apartment on Burling Street with high school friends Bob and Ruby Houdek and their little daughter Sasha. It was a different kind of time than now.  I'd just worked hard in a Presidential election campaign and my candidate had lost, so maybe it wasn't so different.  No, cancel that. It was different.  We'd have a party and Ruby would make her amazing moussaka and we'd have drinks and music, and sometime after midnight a bunch of new people would show up, a replacement party really, and Bob would assume I knew them, Ruby would assume one of the two Bobs knew them, and in reality none of us knew them.  Sometimes little Sasha would toddle into the front room to try on hats in front of a full-length mirror.  It was new living in the city, and having a small child around...

Ruby worked in a landmark plant store called Green Inc. near Lincoln Park; it's still there. Bob, on the road to being a cartographer (people used maps then) worked there too. I commuted 11 miles north to a drafting job, often riding my bike along the Lake Shore bike path. One day Bob's trusty old Volvo PV 544 disappeared.  It was just gone.  Sometime in late spring or early summer, the record store next to Green was the victim of a heist.  Just about everything at Ears Records was gone.  Bob walked over to talk with Tom, the manager.  Tom picked up some records from the floor and gave them to Bob, telling him that this might make it a total loss.  Because we were all music critics at heart, we had different takes on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.  Bob and Ruby preferred the spacey mysticism of the early Floyd, so it wasn't the hit with them that it was with the public.  Bob thought maybe Pink Floyd was turning into a bunch of English essayists like the Moody Blues. We were floored by a record called Solid Air, though.  English / Scottish songwriter and guitarist John Martyn was completely new to us, and he'd crossed a line from acoustic folk into uncharted territory, with brooding, boozy vocals over a yearning sax on the title song, shimmering vibes and a kind of syncopated lounge rhythm behind the piano on "I Don't Want to Know", and a jangly, stuttering use of something called an echoplex on "I'd Rather Be the Devil."  We were hypnotized, and listened to the thing over and over.  In an apartment that already had plenty of candidates for a session on the turntable, Solid Air came to define the space, and our season in it.  We were still getting used to the city, and the curves that it threw at us. One day Bob was walking in the neighborhood and he found his stolen, pale blue Volvo.  It was a little scruffy, but intact; I guess you can't expect thieves to wash the car they've stolen.  Bob still had the key in his pocket, so he just got into the thing a drove it back home. With another amateur photographer, I took photos of industrial zones at night.  The alley wall behind me was sprayed with Gangster Love; this was almost 3 decades before the phrase appeared in a song.  We didn't think much of it at the time.  I thought of the Mob when I thought of gangsters, and knew there were more of those guys in plush suburbs like River Forest than in our Old Town neighborhood...

It was sometime in the late summer when something changed. I was sitting on a front porch in the neighborhood with other friends, Toni and Geoph and Susan. We were talking about moving out a bit from the city, maybe to Evanston, where Toni had a job at Northwestern. We were sitting on the steps eating ice cream when a loud bang came from the corner store to the east.  Somehow we knew it wasn't a car backfiring, but we went running anyway, down to the corner to see what was going on.  Maybe we were thinking we could help; this was before anyone thought much about drive-by shootings, and long before mass shootings became a recurring theme in American life.  We got to the corner and there was a guy on the ground with a hole in his head. Another guy was standing in the doorway with a gun; maybe this was the store owner.  The police came, but I don't recall any of us being interviewed.  In the fall I moved north to Evanston, and when we divided up the record collection from Burling Street I hung onto that copy of Solid Air.  I returned to it again and again; it was as if carefully wrought sound could somehow be a source of light...

Photo & Image Credits

Top: Island Records, front cover photo by John Webster

2nd:  Historic Chicago ("Looking North on Dearborn, 1973")

Bottom:  Photo by Bob Jecmen, from a birthday card by Reiko Fujii

Forgotten Sometimes-Classics: Renault in the USA

›

Renault released its rear-engined, water-cooled Dauphine in 1956 and brought it to the US the following year.  By 1959, when the "Le Car Hot" ad campaign began, they were marketing the 89.4" wheelbase, 845cc 4-door as an alternative to VW's Beetle (94 inches, 1,200 cc, 2 doors). And for a brief moment, the promise of the New French Revolution ad campaign seemed to be coming true.  While nearly 120,000 new VW vehicles were registered in the US that year, Renault sold around 102,000 Dauphines.  But that was the stylishly rounded little car's best year here.  It turned out that the Dauphine was not well-adapted to life on the Interstate, and that Renault dealers were not as ready to provide parts and service as VW dealers, whose cars seemed to need less of both.

By 1962, when Renault produced the R8 with a 956cc inline four and radiator still at the rear, the lines had become more rectilinear to provide more interior and trunk space on the same wheelbase as the Dauphine, and its 4-wheel disc brakes were new to this class of sedan.  By 1964, they'd released a Gordini version named after their engineer, ex-race car maker Amédée Gordini*, with engines ranging from 1.1 to 1.3 liters, and producing up to 95 hp, twice that of the original R8.  Rally success gave the Gordini a certain cachet, and this California example survives in fine condition.  

Jean Rédelé's independent Alpine firm first produced his fiberglass-bodied A110 berlinette, based on the R8 drivetrain in a variety of engine sizes, with steel backbone chassis like the previous A108, starting in 1963.  The little 2-seater had a long and illustrious rally career, winning the World Rally Championship in 1973. The author captured the example below after the Tour de France Auto in 1974.  The car was never imported into the US, however...

The A110 became enough of a collector's trophy, though, that when Renault decided to produce a mid-engined GT car in 2016, then named it after the rear-engined A110 from the Sixties and Seventies. The new car is in the foreground below. 

Other detours and adventures occupied the years between 1977, when the original A110 finally ended production, and 2016.  In 1971 Alpine released the A310, still rear-engined but with the radiator in front, with styling by Trevor Fiore and six covered headlights marching across the sleek fiberglass nose, a clear reference to Alpine Renault's success in international rallying.  The A310 below was also photographed after the '74 Tour de France.  

While rear-engined Renaults were beginning to have rally success, Renault engineers were launching production cars with front-wheel drive. First was the R4, a competitor for Citroen's 2CV, in 1962.  By '65, though, they'd released the R16, a serious effort to redefine the mainstream sedan.  It featured a longitudinally-mounted aluminum inline 4 (from 1,470 to 1,647 cc) driving the front wheels, a hatchback configuration with folding rear seats, those 4 disc brakes, and a practical orientation not unlike the pitch Volvo used to attract US customers.  An unusual feature was torsion bar rear suspension design with non-aligned rear axles, which resulted in different wheelbases on each side of the car (104.3" right, 107.1" left).  The R16 was less successful in the US than in Canada, where it was popular enough to justify a Quebec assembly plant.

Renault's R5 was introduced in 1972 with similar front-drive and rear suspension, and by '75 was competing with the VW Rabbit / Golf and Honda Civic for US customers.  It was marketed in the US as Le Car, harking back to that late Fifties advertising campaign. 

The R5 / Le Car dramatized the divergent views of the engineers who saw front-wheel drive as a universal format, and those who wanted to promote Renault and Alpine Renault as rally winners.  In 1980, the rally crew got a mid-engined Turbo based on the R5 as a rally weapon.  The mid-mounted, turbocharged inline 4 of 1.4 or 1.5 liters sent power to the rear wheels through a 5-speed gearbox, and took the place of the rear seat in a body adapted from the front-drive R5.

Bodywork is credited to Marc Deschamps and Marcello Gandini of Bertone, along with the futuristic interior.   Sales greatly exceeded what was required for a "homologation special" over 5 years of production, with nearly five thousand cars sold.  A few "grey market" cars made it to the US...

Likewise, some V6 versions of Alpine's A310 came to the US through specialists willing and able to certify the cars.  These all had flared wheel wells and rally spoiler kits to go with the 2.7 liter PRV engine and 5-speed gearbox that might have made the lighweight GT an interesting alternative to Porsche's 911, had Renault taken an interest in selling it here.  The example below is from 1984, when production ended...

By then, however, Renault had taken a different route into the US market, focused on front-drive compact versions of the Renault 9 and 11, redesigned for the US market in a $90 million program with American Motors that gave Renault a 46% share in AMC. The resulting Alliance sedans and convertibles, and Encore hatchbacks, were sold in the 1983-'87 model years, but discontinued when Chrysler bought out Renault's share in AMC.  Still, the cars represented Renault's biggest sales success in the US market, with over 623,000 specimens sold.  American Motors was renamed Jeep-Eagle and merged into Chrysler in 1990...

From the '89 to '92 model years, AMC built and sold the Eagle Premier in the US.  A mid-size car by US standards, it was related to the Giugiaro-designed front-drive senior Renaults, and available with 2.5 liter inline four or Peugeot-Renault-Volvo 3.0 liter V6.  Pre-production prototypes had Renault badges, but these were replaced with Eagle badges.  The Bricklin lurking behind our example is a reminder of the difficulties of launching a new make of car, and the Jeep signs above it suggest that AMC's path to success may have been easier if it had invested as much effort into renewing the Jeep brand, in the face of growing demand for SUVs.  After all, it had a decade earlier produced AWD Eagle versions of its Hornet, and Audi was having some success with its Quattro line. When Chrysler bought out Renault's stake in AMC, it was because Chrysler management saw Jeep as the prize.  But that is a story for another day...

*Footnote:  We took a closer look at the Alpine Renault A310 and its A110 predecessor in "Forgotten Classic: Alpine Renault A310", posted here on January 9, 2021, and profiled Amédée Gordini's racing cars in "The Etceterini Files Part 6—Gordini: French Connection, Chicago Subplot", from March 27, 2016.

Errata:  When we posted this piece we noted that the Alpine A110 was based on the Renault R8 chassis.  Wrong; as we noted in our "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 4" (posted here Dec. 27, 2023), the Alpines (including the predecessor A108 and the Brazilian Interlagos) had a steel backbone chassis. Think of something like a Lotus Elan, but turned around so the engine is at the wrong end...

Photo Credits:
Top, plus 5th, 7th and 8th from top:  Groupe Renault S.A.

2nd & 3rs:  Gogo Heinrich
4th, 6th, 9th & 10th::  the author

11th::  bringatrailer.com

12th & bottom::  Wikimedia