A Renault 16 from the OldMotors archives today as we flash back to booming 1970s Abidjan, the cosmopolitan heart of Côte d’Ivoire. Admittedly, it doesn’t look so “cosmopolitan” here, but at the time Côte d’Ivoire…
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1987-93 Pontiac LeMans: Partners at Odds
It seemed like a great idea – take a respected small car designed in Germany, where engineers know about good dynamics and quality cars, manufacture it cheaply in South Korea, then sell it in America…
Saab 95: Swedish Family Style
The Saab 95 was the first car from Trollhätten to truly expand on the Saab formula. It arrived a decade after the first production Saab, the 92, but its roots in the “Ursaab” project of…
Flashback: Peugeot 204 en Bourgogne
Today’s photo from the archives goes back to 1960s France, where somebody’s looking for directions to the next winery behind the wheel of a Peugeot 204. Like the wines of famous Côte-d’Or vintner Jacques Seysses,…
Ford Fairmont: The First Fox
The Ford Fairmont was Dearborn’s first “downsized” car. Unlike GM, Ford started at the middle of its lineup post-OPEC and worked outward. But like GM’s “Project 77” cars, what became the Fairmont actually started off…
Mazda Navajo: Kentucky, not Hiroshima
“America builds one for the Japanese!” read the headline introducing the Mazda Navajo. It came after almost two decades of American brands offering “captive import” Japanese vehicles (starting in the early 1970s with the Dodge…
VAZ-2106: The People’s Favorite Lada
The definitive version in Soviet times was the VAZ-2106, but there were many iterations of the basic Lada package. What else would you expect from a car with such a long lifespan? The first Ladas…
Škoda 1200 & 1201: Modern for Mladá Boleslav
It wasn’t the most exciting car, but what an evocative photo! The car is a Škoda 1201, an outgrowth of the closely related (and visually almost identical) Škoda 1200. The basic vehicle was the second…
Panhard PL 17: The Two-Cylinder Tiger
Today our feature car is a 1960 Panhard PL 17, a highly unconventional car with its origins in the 1940s and the imagination of talented French engineer Jean-Albert Grégoire. But to really understand where it…
Ford Bronco Mk1: A Horse Untamed
It could be fairly said that 1964 was Ford’s year of the horse. That April, Ford’s epoch-defining Mustang debuted at the New York World’s fair. The Mustang not only created an entirely new market, it…
Rambler Ambassador: The Nash Legacy
American Motors was born on May 1, 1954, with the merger of Nash-Kelvinator and the Hudson Motor Car Co. By 1960 it was a very different company than Nash or Hudson had been, defined by…
Fiat Brava: Could’ve Been a Contender
A trip to the film archives takes us back today to OldMotors’ very own 1981 Fiat Brava, then just an unloved old car from a largely forgotten make. Better known as the 131, Fiat changed…