Cars made worse by facelifts

[Carledo]

Fiat 500,
VW Beetle,
Mini

I can't really agree that these are facelifts, they are new cars from top to bottom that just happen (yeah, right) to resemble the classic cars they were named for! 2 of the 3 don't even have the engine and driving wheels in the right place! This is not a facelift, it's a cynical cash cow preying on customer nostalgia. And it has produced a spitting image puppet of the original in each case! Of the 3, only the Fiat has done any sort of half decent job of reproducing the proportions of the original car.

They bear the same resemblance to the originals as the 2004 Pontiac GTO (sold as the Vauxhall Monaro in the UK and actually built by Holden in Australia) does to the 1964 Pontiac GTO (built in Detroit, the first true musclecar and brainchild of the notorious John Z Delorean)

Steve

[tony g]

MGb, plastic bumper looked awful (I know it was regs that drove it but still not as nice.

Tony

[Bumpa]

MGb, plastic bumper looked awful (I know it was regs that drove it but still not as nice.

Tony

The big bumpers looked even worse on the Midget. If you paint them in body colour they aren't quite so bad.

[tony g]

Agree

Tony

[cleverusername]

MGb, plastic bumper looked awful (I know it was regs that drove it but still not as nice.

Tony

I feel I am defending the companies allot here but to be fair the problem was US safety regs and BL lacking the money to properly update the design to meet those regs.

Since the TR7 went into production in 75 and that was suppose to be the future of BLs sport car range. It probably didn't make sense to BL to spend much cash on updating their older sports cars.

[cleverusername]

You described it as an 'ancient design', yet it was face lifted just the once in 2001, just five years after its launch.

It was nothing to do with crash safety standards as the structure of the vehicle remains the same underneath the clamshells; it was an ill advised management decision, a new broom sweeping clean.

The Series 1 could not be produced beyond the 2000 model production year due to new European crash sustainability regulations, so Lotus needed a development partner to meet the investment requirement for a Series 2 car. General Motors offered to fund the project, in return for a badged and GM-engined version of the car for their European brands, Opel and Vauxhall.

The Series 2 Elise, announced on 9 October 2000, was a redesigned Series 1 using a slightly modified version of the Series 1 chassis to meet the new regulations, and the same K-series engine with a brand new Lotus-developed ECU. The design of the body paid homage to the earlier M250 concept, and was the first Lotus to be designed on a computer.[18]

I admit Wikipedia is not 100% reliable but they seem to suggest it was modified to meet regs and that is why they needed money from GM and made the Vauxhall version.

[xvivalve]

Sustainability has nothing to do with safety.

The minor modification can be made beneath the S1 body shell.

What we have here is a recognised bad business decision being protected by legislative excuses.