Different theory: Lots of french cars manage to survive in europe, which isn’t warm and dry all the time, but this is because for the past 25 years or so the rust protection on most french cars has been very good actually. The main problem with these earlier models was rust (as with most vehicles from the 60s-70s),…

It appears to be based on the Panda Cross, which is the hardcore off-road version of the Panda 4x4.

Roughly the same. But the Panda is a far more space efficient shape. 

Most of the early ForFour were likely optioned with the conventional manual transmission. 

Big non-luxury cars were most definetely a thing here. Very successful too. Things such as the large Fords and Opels, low-spec Mercedes and Audi. That all began to die in the 80s and 90s, just as the Japanese were starting to introduce larger family cars.

There is a partially stripped (stolen) one at our shop. Does that count?

Re: Omega. A friend of mine bought one of these in sedan form for €650. For the money, there was little visible rust and most of the equipment still worked. Don’t get fooled by it being RWD though, the suspension on these is so ridiculously soft that you are not going to get it sideways ever unless you’re in snow.…

They didn’t. 

The same vintage Veritas Meteor F2 looks remarkably similar though.

The normal 500 is based on the 2003 Fiat Panda platform. It is, for all its worth, a 16 year old car. And it shows. At work we have a few of these as multi-purpose vehicles and while extremely reliable (they have the ancient but bombproof 1.2L 8 valve 69hp FIRE engines) they do drive like an economy car from the early…

Why not just make a four seater, mid-engine V12 SUV?

Strongly disagree with you on this. I think electric cars are more turbo than ICEs, since most electricity is produced by one of these:

Sup

A bit of Context here. In earlier times, us Germans used the word “Großraumlimousine” (which literally translates to Large Space Limousine) to refer to Minivans, before anglicisms such as “Van” became more common (In other news, in the german language Limousine refers to a Sedan). The V-Class line meanwhile is split…

IKR

Why would anyone care about this historically significant one-off high performance luxury saloon when the C8 Corvette is faster and only costs $60.000?

They did, 20 years ago. 

The X-Type is way more than just a rebadged Ford. 

The Land Cruiser name first appeared in 1954 didn’t it? There is a 65th anniversary right there, although I prefer to think that the Heritage Edition is a shameless celebration of its incredible longevity. 

Technically, while Auto Union survived WW2, most of its manufacturing facilitites were in east germany. Under soviet rule, what was the original Auto Union became what we now mostly know as Trabant. Audi as a brand had existed since 1909. Auto Union relocated to West Germany in 1949, however none of the Auto Union…