Celebrating the car world’s saviours | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

I guess the most obvious example is the Aston Martin DB7, because while the company was owned by Ford at the time, there were some executives in Dearborn with so little interest in the acquisition they genuinely thought they’d bought something called Austin Martin. By then Aston Martin had lost almost all its in house engineering ability and had Jaguar not turned down a TWR proposal for reskinning the XJS, and had Tom Walkinshaw not had the smarts to think this could instead be just what Aston Martin needed, and had Ian Callum not had the raw talent to pen its near unimprovable shape… well few commentators would have bet tuppence on Ford’s patience not running out very soon thereafter.

But there are others. Who today remembers VW’s struggles in the 1960s and ‘70s to produce a true successor to the ageing Beetle? Nothing worked while the company got into deeper and deeper trouble until it found itself, an employer of nearly a quarter of a million people worldwide, in an existential crisis.

Something had to be done – its rear-engined, air-cooled past needed to be discarded and replaced by something which, conventional as it sounds today was, for Volkswagen, utterly radical. The company turned to design genius Giorgetto Giugiaro who came up first with the Passat and then a design so effortlessly simple, so obviously right, it became known as the second milestone in VW history, better known to you and me as the Golf. The ID.3 was billed as the third, but it’s fair to say that particular story has yet to turn out as well as that of either the Beetle or Golf.

It's no less hard today to think of a time when BMW had its back against the wall, but in the early 1960s after years of slow selling exotics like the 507 and microcars with next to nothing profit margins, that’s exactly where it found itself. As happened to VW a dozen years later, it was rescued by something completely straight forward, but beautifully conceived. Known as the ‘Neue Klasse’ and starting with the 1500, a simple four door saloon, it spawned a series of coupes and family cars culminating with the likes of the 2002 Turbo which completely transformed BMW’s fortunes and, indeed, people’s perception of the brand.

We must not forget either how completely the 205 restored Peugeot’s reputation in 1983, nor how the 2003 Continental GT turned Bentley from a fusty old cottage industry struggling to make much more than 1000 cars a year into a thoroughly modern manufacturer of some of the most desirable sporting luxury cars of the early 21st century, selling ten times – and more – as many.

But I guess when I look at car manufacturers today that got into such trouble their very existence was called into question, the one I marvel at most is Porsche. Today it is one of the most successful car brands on the market but it wasn’t so long ago at all it appeared to be doomed. Just 30 years in fact.

Back then its products were aged, expensive to buy and – almost unbelievably – even more expensive to build. When the company killed both the 968 and 928 during the course of 1995 there was a period of time when the 911 was the only car it made, the irony being of course that this was the car Porsche had first tried to kill off when it introduced the 928 almost twenty years earlier. The choice it faced was simple: adapt or die.

So the company called in some consultants from Japan to go through the business who, once they’d collected their jaws from where they’d fallen onto the factory floor after they first saw how Porsche was trying to do business, told some pretty harsh truths. Perhaps the toughest of these was it probably wasn’t a great idea to have three product ranges which had next to nothing to do with each other. It would be somewhat better to produce one platform and spin literally everything off it. The result was the Boxster, the Cayman and the 996-generation 911, cars that were all but identical from the doors forward, all powered by versions of the same engine and gearbox. The company was saved.

So, while I don’t think for a moment that Renault would have ceased to exist but for the new Cinq, in some cases, for some manufacturers, that is unquestionably the truth.