Car whores

When in comes to selling cars, the badge obviously means a lot, but for buyers the nameplate often doesn’t tell the whole story. Take that good old South African favourite, the Toyota Hilux. How many of you lot know that in the 1980s Volkswagen assembled the pickup in Europe and sold it as the VW Toro? While neither company owns shares in the other, they’re willing to do business together. Bet you also never knew that Toyota today has the sole distribution rights for VW products in Japan!

Volkswagen wasn’t in bed only with Toyota, however. The Germans set up a joint venture with Ford in Latin America in 1993, and South Africans who visited the region were surely puzzled to see thinly disguised Ford Escorts bearing VW Logus badges, while the VW Passat masqueraded as a Ford Versailles.

It will also come as a surprise to many of you to hear that Toyota has quietly worked together with Yamaha for more than 40 years. The motorcycle company has designed and built Toyota’s high-performance engines for decades — the twin-cam RSi and other aluminium-block engines all come from Yamaha. The latter also supplies engines to Ford, which owns Volvo, so guess whose 4,4-litre V8 rests under the bonnet of the Volvo XC90?

Toyota’s dealings spread to the US as well, and many American Chevrolet Nova buyers between 1985 and 1988 would have been aggrieved to hear that their new cars were, in fact, fifth-generation Toyota Corollas, built under licence in California, with Chevy badges slapped on.

Economy of scale is increasingly important in car production, and manufacturers routinely enter into joint ventures with their opposition, enabling all partners to get new models out speedily and cheaply. The first-generation “new” Mini, launched about 10 years ago, used a Tritec engine built in Brazil. Tritec was formed as a joint venture between the Rover Group and Daimler-Chrysler, and the same basic engine was used in the Chrysler Neon.

The latest Mini uses an engine designed jointly by BMW, Peugeot and Citroën, which will be used by all three companies in future, but the Tritec won’t disappear — Chinese manufacturer Lifan has bought the Brazilian plant and is transporting it lock, stock and barrel to China, where it will churn out engines capable of passing European and American emission-control laws.

Manufacturers used simply to impose badge engineering on the public, whereby virtually identical cars would be sold bearing different manufacturers’ plates. Today they rely on sharing platforms. The same floor pan, underpinnings and often engines are used to build cars with very different characteristics, sharing perhaps 60% of their components. The Ford Focus, Mazda3 and Volvo S40 are all built on a common platform, and the Citroën C1, Peugeot 107 and Toyota Aygo, all produced in the same European factory, are virtually identical under the skin. General Motors owns Saab and Cadillac, so it should come as no surprise to hear that the latest Cadillacs are more Swedish than American, being built in Sweden by Saab, using a GM platform.

The list goes on and on — the Nissan 350Z and the Murano SUV both use Renault Vel Satis engines, while the Dodge Caliber diesel shares a platform with the Mitsubishi Lancer and the new Jeep Patriot, and is powered by a VW Golf 2.0 TDI engine. The Chrysler Crossfire is really a dolled-up previous-generation Mercedes-Benz SLK, and the 2007 Opel Corsa shares much of its DNA with the 2006 Fiat Grande Punto. Ford uses engines born of the Peugeot/Citroën alliance in some of its diesel offerings. Daihatsu, owned largely by Toyota, builds its dinky little Sirion (also called the Daihatsu Boon on some markets) for the parent company, which offers it in Asia as the Toyota Passo. To complicate things further, it builds essentially the same car, for sale in Europe only, as the Subaru Justy. Yup — Toyota bought General Motors’s shares in Subaru two years ago, and now they are consolidating.

Corporate types get very touchy when you ask them how much their new model has in common with a rival, but they really shouldn’t be too precious — there’s nothing new about all this. BMW’s very first car, launched in 1928, was actually an Austin Seven built under licence. In 1933, the German company produced its first “own” car, but 12 years later, after World War II, the winners punished the Germans severely; part of the punishment involved shipping the tooling for the superb BMW 328 off to England. There, it was used as a pattern for the new Bristol Cars company. The BMW engine was subsequently used in many British cars, including the iconic AC Bristol and Frazer Nash sports models.

One further titbit that may be of particular interest to South Africans is that the good old Nissan 1400 bakkie, still on sale here after about 40 years, uses an engine derived from the ancient Austin A40. That’s one collaboration that worked out very well!

Originally published in MPH ’08