Just 12,100 Renaults were sold in the U.S. in 1966, down from a dizzying high of 91,000 in 1959. The blame for this lay squarely on the Dauphine and Renault’s haphazard approach to building a…
Posts tagged Cars of the 1960s
Flashback: Rue de l’Écureuil en Rouen
A Sunday flashback today to 1970s France and a spectacularly diverse array of machines that were, at the time, just people’s regular cars. So where are we? Rouen, more specifically Rue de l’Écureuil, circa 1971….
Jeep M676: The Diesel Regiment
In the pantheon of weird Jeeps this is probably one of the weirdest – and rarest. It’s a Jeep Forward Control, and while all Jeep FCs are rare, this one is particularly unusual. Look closely,…
BMW 1600 GT: Glas Tiger
It lasted for just 12 months, and in that time, only 1,255 found homes, but you can’t say BMW didn’t give it a chance. The BMW 1600 GT was, arguably, born on November 10, 1966…
Flashback: The Detective’s Renault 16
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…
Rover P6: Modern Disguised as Traditional
James Bond might have driven Astons, but George Smiley was a Rover P6 man. Alec Guinness gave Smiley international TV fame two years after Star Wars, and two years after P6 production ended. Guinness was…
Bonnet Djet: The Mid-Engined Arms Race
The “D” in Djet was there purely for pronunciation purposes. The car’s creator, the already famous René Bonnet, wasn’t sure if his fellow French would properly pronounce the English-language word “Jet!” the way he wanted….
Toyota Sports 800: Toyota’s Little Lotus
Today the Toyota Sports 800 seems so different from the kinds of cars Toyota is largely famous for that it’s hard to believe the same folks who came up with the Corolla also designed it….
Auto Union 1000S: First and Last and Always
The four linked rings are most associated with Audi today, but they originated with Auto Union. The “Union” was an agglomeration of four German companies – Audi, DKW, Horch, and Wanderer, that came together under…
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,…
Shaping Safety: Béla Barényi and the “Fintail”
Mercedes were purposefully meant to be timeless in the eyes of Daimler-Benz’s chief engineer Fritz Nallinger, but including the subtle fins on the new Heckflosse sedans forever linked the W110, W111, and W112 designs (collectively…
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…