Forgotten Siblings

Podcast Episode: 0211
How did we forget about these cars?

    How did we all forget about these siblings, as if they never existed?  Most great products will have a sibling to help cover the development costs, but what about the ones we forgot about.  This is where AutoLooks steps in, to find out what happened to the ones we forgot about.

​       We all have siblings. Well, maybe not all of us in the world, but some of us like to forget our siblings, myself included, I do. I would rather, but we really don't talk. Siblings are those things and within the automotive world, a lot of vehicles have siblings, but not always are the siblings remembered. They could be even great products, or even products just may tanner specific markets, but those siblings have existed in time but don't get as much attention as the original product, or, hell, even they may not be the original product. This sibling itself may be the one that gets more attention, but why do car companies all have these siblings? Well, platform building is part of it, but why do they all do it? And why do these car companies want us to all forget about the long-lost siblings of a multitude of vehicles? Today, AutoLooks is going to take a look at some of the most amazing siblings in the forgotten industry. We're not talking about your Plymouth Voyager compared to your Caravan. We're talking about some of the vehicles that you won't even remember had an alternative from a division, either included or not part of the same family. All today on the AutoLooks Podcast.
 
      Welcome back to the AutoLooks Podcast. I'm your host, as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our main host website at AutoLooks.net. If you haven't been there, stop by check it out, read some of the ratings, check out some of the reviews and go to the corporate links website page. Big or small, we have them all car companies from around the globe on the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm entertainment group and distributed by podbeam.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. So forgotten siblings. Now.
 
      We all know about platform building and how a lot of automotive companies out there like to make as much money off the exact same platform, but sometimes they build products off of those platforms for either other car companies or the same company. That just completely gets thrown by the wind. We remember one product better than the other one. One of my old roommates in college actually owned one of these vehicles. We all know about the Ford Mustangs in the 1980s, but how many of you remember the Mercury Capri, a sibling to the Mustang, how they even had aftermarket variation of it, a performance product of the Mercury Capri? Mercury did this because Ford wanted to make more money off the platform and considering, at the end of the 70s, ford was willing to pull the plug completely on the Ford Mustang after the failed Mustang II attempt to rejuvenate the product for a new generation of eco-friendly, fuel-efficient mindset customers. They nearly killed the Mustang off and with 20,000 letters within the first month of them even considering getting rid of the Mustang, they said no, we can't do this. So, they built a brand-new platform called the Fox Platform and they said to themselves if the Mustang doesn't sell, what are we can't do this. So, they built a brand-new platform called the fox platform and they said to themselves if the mustang doesn't sell, what are we going to do? Well, let's give mercury a counterpart and we'll just see. Maybe the mercury could drop a few extra sales for us. They did and they gave the mustang its own sibling.
 
      You have to remember the mustang originally comes from the ford falcon platform but throughout history it's never had its own sibling until the 1980s when it had the mercury capri utilizing a name ford over in Europe, a big name, the ford capri. Mercury decided to utilize this for the north American marketplace. Now, when the capri moved on to its second generation in north America, it became its own dedicated sports car, the Mercury Capri. But why would they do that? They did that to go after the Buick Reatta and even the Mazda Miata. Considering the fact that the Mustang had enough sales to hold its own, they didn't need the Mercury sibling to keep it up. This goes back as Ford and Mercury have had a lot of siblings that we don't remember.
 
      Remember the Pinto? Well, the Pinto had its own variation from Mercury, the Mercury Bobcat. Yeah, kind of interesting, a Mercury variation of it. This was again true with the Ford Focus ZX2s. They had the Mercury LN7 sports coupe from the 1980s. And then you start getting into other vehicles like the Mercury Villager, built off the Nissan Quest platform. Yeah, they had a Nissan Quest-based Mercury product. But remember, Nissan was a lot bigger name. You'd think Mercury would have its own variation of the Windstar, but because it was trying to move into a different marketplace, they chose to utilize the Nissan Quest Horrible looking thing if you've ever seen it. Now we all know. Near the end of its life, it had its own variations of Ford products. The Mercury Milan, the Mercury Montego and even the Mercury Mariner were all siblings of the Ford products the Fusion, the 500, and the Escape. They all had variations for Mercury, but they were never really big because Mercury was dying out.
 
     Well, 2006, with the Ford Fusion not bringing back to life the Ford Contour SVT, mercury decided hey, we want to rejuvenate this brand. We're going to give you the Mercury Volga Milan, a turbocharged performance product from Mercury. They wanted to give something they didn't have anything cool before that, like the last edition of the Cougar was essentially just a two-door sports coupe. It wasn't nothing big. So, Mercury wanted to go out with a bang. This was 2006 and you have to remember, by 2009 Mercury was gone. Done-zo, they killed them off. It was its last heyday, one of the last great products from Mercury.
 
       We don't even remember because everybody remembers the ford fusion. That's kind of like going back to the Dodge Ramcharger. Everybody remembers the ram charger. Oh, dodge had this big SUV. Hell, that thing even lived on for a second generation, built off of the transport style of the early 90s in Mexico, as the Charger as well. But we all remember Dodge had a variation. It had a sibling company with Plymouth and Plymouth had the Trail Duster, kind of like. Dodge had the Dodge Challenger but Plymouth had the Barracuda. Plymouth was always playing second fiddle to Dodge and the only time it ever won the day is when it had the Prowler, which is a product we all remember. But if you didn't know this, the PT Cruiser was originally supposed to be a Plymouth product. It was supposed to be the Pronto Cruiser, but at the last minute, because they killed them off, they didn't utilize it.
 
        Plymouth had a lot of vehicles and a lot of sibling products throughout its time. Some of them we all remember the Plymouth Breeze and the Plymouth Voyager but not all of them we remember. You remember the Diplomats, but do you remember the Plymouth Reliant? Yeah, their variation of the K-Car was the Reliant. Everyone remembers the K-Car. That's a K-Car, that's a K-Car. Well, Chrysler used the New Yorker nameplate and Plymouth had the Reliant nameplate. There were siblings off the same platform, but we only remember one. Of course, we don't want to remember any of them, but they were there. But that's just because of the divisional mess. Plymouth was kind of just there. You have to remember.
 
      Plymouth was created at a time when Walter P Chrysler realized he needed an entry-level product for his corporation and Dodge at that point in time was only building trucks. So, he built the Plymouth brand. Dodge eventually got into cars and bam, Plymouth was kicked by the wayside, even though it was there with DeSoto as well. And DeSoto was kicked out similar to that of Eagle. If you all remember, the Eagle name plate came from when Chrysler Corporation bought out American Motors. One of the last great products that American Motors ever built was the Eagle branded Cross trek vehicles. So, Chrysler decided to keep the name.
 
      Now, Eagle had tons of cars. We all remember one of them. More people remember the Eagle Talon because of its counterpart, the Mitsubishi Eclipse. But you don't remember. Plymouth had a variation of that, the Plymouth Laser, which is a name utilized after Chrysler decided to give its own sports car in the 1980s, utilizing the last variation of the Dodge Charger which became the Daytona, the Chrysler Laser XT. Chrysler had a sports car in the 1980s which they wouldn't again have a sports car until Plymouth went defunct and they took over the Prowler as the Chrysler Prowler. But the Eagle nameplate. Eagle was kind of a variation of Mitsubishi for the Chrysler brand. Their Eagle Premier was a Mitsubishi. The Eagle Summit was the same thing as the Dodge Colt, which is the same thing as the Mitsubishi Colt.
 
      Eagle Vista those are those weird crossover vans. Or my favorite, eagle Vision. Everybody remembers the Intrepid or the Concorde, the original cab forward designed vehicles that were supposed to be rear wheel drive for the Chrysler Corporation but at the last minute they decided to change it. My first vehicle I ever owned essentially; I was. I drove it for a few years and then my dad gifted it to me. It was a 1994 Chrysler Concorde and I always liked the look of the Concorde front end better than the Intrepid, but I preferred the taillights on an Eagle Vision compared to any of them. And when I built my custom version of it, those are the lights I was going to utilize. And people looked at them and they were like, oh, you're going to update your Concorde lights. I'm like, no, I'm taking them from the Eagle Vision. They're like Eagle. Oh yeah, the Talon. I'm like well, eagle actually had a lot more products. We all remember that one breakthrough products that they all have.
 
       You may not remember this, but Honda has actually utilized both Isuzu and Land Rover to enter the SUV marketplace. In the early 90s, when the Ford Explorer was blowing up, Mazda originally had a variation of the first-generation Ford Explorer called the Mazda Navajo, and Mercury had their Mariner. Now the Explorer was the mainstay. We all remember that, because we all remember seeing that product in Jurassic Park and with that market blowing up, everybody wanted to get into it. Honda was skeptical about doing this and because they didn't want to get into producing new vehicles, considering the fact that the downfall of their home market, they didn't have the money to put this up and just releasing Acura only a few years earlier, they decided to hold off building their own manufactured facility. We'd have to wait until the late 90s before the original CR-V came out, which was not the first Honda SUV.
 
       In 1993, they had both the Land Rover Discovery Variation, the Honda Crossroad, but with Land Rover not being synonymous for its quality, it was a very short-lived European product. To essentially help Honda enter the SUV marketplace In North America, they decided to utilize Isuzu. With the Isuzu Amigas they had the Honda Passport yeah, recognize that name. They brought it back 1993, you can find a Honda passport. They're very hard to find because you find the Isuzu variations all over the place. Honda had one back in those days. Hell, in 95 they hit the Isuzu Trooper brand, Acura SLX with Lexus, making the lx 450 variation of land cruiser which essentially created a downfall because the LX became bigger. Everyone was looking at this brand-new SUV marketplace. But yes, Honda entered that market in the early 90s.
 
       The funny thing is, with the rise of the early SUV marketplace in the early 90s, you had a whole abundance of amazing products that hit the market that nobody remembers. Like I said, in 1990, they had the Mazda Navajo, a Ford Explorer branded Mazda. We all thought the Mazda Tribute was their first SUV, but it wasn't. You have to remember they were still building the B-Series with the Ranger, so they were still allowed to utilize the Explorer platform because it was similar to that of the Ford Rangers. Everybody remembers well, actually nobody remembers that Oldsmobile actually entered the SUV marketplace and in 1990, they had the Oldsmobile Bravada built off of the GMC Jimmy platforms. Yes, those old Jimmys and Blazers gave us the Oldsmobile Bravada. But where luxury was not king, even in the SUV marketplace, the Bravada wouldn't live on, even though it was an actual SUV.
 
      Oldsmobile was there before both Cadillac and Buick. Now, Buick would have its mainstay in the sibling’s part of this world later on, when they gave us the Buick Terrazzo. Now, you have to remember Oldsmobile had the original silhouettes. They gave us the Buick Terrazzo. They have to remember Oldsmobile had the original silhouettes. They built a variation of those weird Chevy Lumina vans that they had, you know, in the early 90s, where the windshield was like the whole front-end Oldsmobile had one which was considered. Actually, if you go back and watch I can't remember the name of the movie, but it's got John Travolta in it. He drives up in one of those and he says it's a Cadillac of minivans and it was an Oldsmobile. So, they held on.
 
      Buick didn't enter the minivan marketplace until the last variation of the minivans and they brought us the Terrazzo minivan which also had the Saturn relay. Yeah, you guys all remember Saturn. Saturn actually had, right near the end it started creating different variations of all kinds of General Motors products when they weren't branded Opel vehicles, coming over to the North American marketplace with the Opel Astra, the Saturn Astra and the Saturn Aura. Saturn also had the Outlook built off the GMC Acadia platform, and the Relay built off the Pontiac Montana platform. They had variations of all of these things, but these siblings were never big and popular.
 
     They were there to fill a gap from products and divisions that people liked and that's why a lot of these car companies were doing this. They were filling these marketplaces and utilizing these platforms to get either their companies back into these marketplaces or to fill a niche. Kia did this by buying out the early 90s Lotus Elan platform. You can actually find a Kia Elan sports car the only sports car Kia has ever really built and they built it by utilizing Lotus technology and Lotus platform. All they really did was change the logo on it. Everything else is all Lotus, but nobody remembers because barely anyone remembers the original lotus lawns from 1990s, kind of like De Tomaso.
 
     When they came back in 2000, they had the Magnusta. It was De Tomaso everywhere else, but in north America they couldn't get the rights to the name, so they had a distributor selling it for them as Qvale. This one was a name change only due to rights of the vehicles. Now, how many of you remember the Qvale Magnusta? Everybody remembers De Tomaso. Everybody knows that De Tomaso built that and it was a De Tomaso. But in North America it didn't hit the market that way because it didn't win the naming rights.
 
     There have been a whole multitude of different siblings that we've talked about. One of the funniest siblings in history that you wouldn't even think was around Cadillac has never been able to make a go out of entry-level compact luxury cars, where Mercedes-Benz has the A-Class and Audi has become great with its A3 classes. Cadillac utilized the Cavalier platform back in the 80s with Cimarron. Yes, a Cadillac compact in the 1980s. Who was even thinking about compact luxury back then? Well, Cadillac figured well, if we can create a Pontiac variation and a Chevy variation, we can hell build one for Cadillac as well. Huh yeah, nobody bought it, kind of like the Cadillac Mirage El Dorado. That was actually a really weird thing because it wasn't an El Camino but it was a pickup truck variation of the El dorado, a sibling to a standard product.
 
     Now, so far, we've all talked about siblings of other cars, but sometimes these companies enter different markets. Back in the 90s, Toyota had a hard go of trying to enter the Chinese marketplace and with that they needed help. They got help from Chevrolet and if you actually go and look for it in 1995, they had what they called the Toyota Cavalier. Now, if you remember the original plant that Tesla took over in California, that old Fremont manufacturing facility, that's what originally built the old Chevy Novas and Toyota Corollas back in the 80s, which eventually would go on to build the Pontiac Vibes and Toyota Matrix. But the Cavalier. The Toyota Cavalier was essentially just a purebred Chevrolet with a Toyota logo on it, used for Asian marketplaces. Volkswagen did the similar thing by utilizing a Toyota vehicle because they wanted to enter the pickup truck market. Before the Amarok, Toyota actually used the old T100s or Tacoma’s or Hilux in some markets to build the Volkswagen Taro. A sibling of a Toyota Volkswagen, was there, hell Lincoln. Remember the Lincoln LS? It had its own counterpart with a Jaguar S-Type, both of them equally responsible for the other twos. But nobody remembers the S-Type Well, barely anyone remembers the LS.
 
      One of the greatest ones is the fact that General Motors up until the financial crisis in 2008, owned Fuji Industrial, which was Subaru, and with that, Saab. As they were trying to keep Saab alive, with only the 9-3 platform under its belt and a brand new 9-5 platform coming out, they needed to get more product sales out of Saab. So, they built, by utilizing a Subaru Impreza platform, the Saab 9-2X and, as we had the trailblazers, we eventually got the Saab 9-7X siblings. Saab needed products to keep itself alive. General Motors was adding its front clip to other companies' products to keep it alive, but these siblings were not making it and eventually Saab would kick the bucket, similar to that of how the Mitsubishi Raider and even the Suzuki Equator and even Hummer H3T pickup truck, in a mid-sized marketplace that was starting to crap out, was too late for those products. Mitsubishi needed a pickup truck, so they used the Dakota Actually even looked way better than the Dakotas they had at that time, but nobody remembers that because Dodge owned that mid-sized marketplace. The Suzuki Equator was brought out because people wanted the Suzuki pickup truck to move their dirt bikes around, so they used the Nissan Frontier, very short-lived as the financial crisis brought everything down.
 
     Some people look at car companies and ask them hey, we want you to build something for us because we need to enter this marketplace. You could say that Honda did that with the Crossroad and the original Passports. Volkswagen utilized the number one selling minivan in the world, their last minivan that they had in North America, the Rutan. I actually know somebody that owns one of these things and when you pop the hood, everything is Chrysler labeled Like we said, just a slight change. It was even built in Windsor, Ontario, but nobody remembers it.
 
     There are so many different siblings out there that people don't remember. Some siblings are utilized only because a division is not strong enough. Both Chrysler and Lancia did that with their products. When FCA was created, Chrysler had a better naming right in the United Kingdom so they had the Chrysler Delta and the Chrysler Ypsilon, which were both Lancia-based products. Over in Italy you get the Fiat Fremont, the Dodge Journey, the Lancia Flavia and the Lancia Thema the whole Chrysler Corporation vehicles blended over together because one nameplate was stronger than the other.
 
      Other siblings are created because they need something for their own home marketplace that they don't have the offer. Proton has done this many times by utilizing Mitsubishi counterparts. We all remember the Mitsubishi Lancer, but nobody remembers the Proton Inspira Kind of like when the original BRZ and GT86 came out. Nobody remembers the original Scion FR-S or the fact that the original Nissan Juke had an Infiniti counterpart called the ESQ. Nobody remembers a lot of these things. The Suzuki Jimny created the Mazda AZ Off-Road Hell. Some people even build siblings to other vehicles just to maintain market share or get their CAF agreements down. Aston Martin did that with the Toyota iQ building the Aston Martin Signet.
 
      These siblings are required for specific parts in the marketplace. They want to make more money off of the same platforms, something you don't see a lot of today, as every freaking car company out there is all out for blood against even its own divisions. Like you have to ask yourself, when you build something for alfa Romeo or a brand-new product for fiat, they have the brand-new fiat panda. How come it doesn't have a Peugeot, a Citroen, Opel, Vauxhall, Dodge, a Chrysler, an alfa Romeo or even a Maserati counterpart built off of it? When FCA got together, they built Lancia variations of Chrysler, an Alfa Romeo or even a Maserati counterpart built off of it. When FCA got together, they built Lancia variations of Chrysler and Chrysler variations to Lancia. They created siblings from different markets.
 
     Today there's not a lot of siblings out there and as there have been a lot of great siblings in the past that we don't remember, they were all required for their point in time. Car companies either thought it was a great idea. They built them to keep their market shares Hell. Some car companies did it just so they can make some money off of that. The last Fiat Spider was built off of the Mazda Miata platform. Now it was supposed to be an Alfa Romeo because Mazda didn't want competition, whereas Ford owned a great portion of Mazda, hence the reason why they had both the B-Series and the Ranger. They knew people. Not everybody's going to buy that.
 
      Today we all try and focus on getting core sales to only our products and we don't want to share those products with everyone else. Where up until the early 2000s, everybody was doing that, they were all utilizing the best from everyone out there to keep all these multitude of divisions out there, created siblings upon siblings, even if those siblings would never be remembered, like the Suzuki sidekick and Chevy Tracker. Pontiac had their own variation called the Sunrunner. That nobody remembers. But they built it because Pontiac wanted people to get into their marketplace and they knew they could sell something that small. Mitsubishi knew they could sell a Raider pickup truck because Mitsubishi people may not be inclined to buy a Dodge product.
 
     The funny thing is today most people don't care about brand identity or even care about the brand they own. There's not a lot of brand loyalty still left in the automotive world. That's why today you don't see a lot of siblings. The BRZ and GT86 is one of the few siblings still in existence between two different companies Well, not essentially because Fuji Industrial is now owned by Toyota, but different divisions and those two are still kicking around, still battling out, even though they look very similar to each other, but they're just as important to each one of their segments.
 
     We need siblings between all these different car companies, and all these siblings need a place in history. We all remember them, we all remember seeing them, but do we believe that they still exist or ever did exist? Some of these cars have not been subjected to, as you call it, the Mandela effect, whereas everybody keeps telling me that movie with Shaquille O'Neal Shazam never existed, not because it was called Kazam. I remember seeing it. I remember what happened. These siblings existed and they're the same as their counterparts. They were there for a short time and they were there for a reason. Today we may not remember them and we may not remember why these kinds of companies created them, but you may not remember why these car companies created them, but they were there and they served a purpose in the marketplace.
 
    The forgotten siblings of the past always give rise to the collectibles of the future Because, as we know, the siblings that are forgotten are the collection-worthy products of the future. You may not think that a Geo Storm is a collectible product, or the old Isuzu Impulse, or how an original Honda Passport was ever a collectible car, but if you owned one of those. When the new generation of the Passport came out, it was cool, similar to my Borrego. When the Telluride came out, I had an original SUV from Kia. Now you just got the new one. It existed, it was there before, but we don't remember it and like that sibling that we just don't want to talk to anymore.
 
     These forgotten siblings can get lost in time unless we keep them alive while talking about it. So, do we need to remember all these forgotten siblings? No, not really, but they're great to look at and it's great to remember that. You know there were so many different automotive divisions out there Only up to about a decade ago. We had so many different car companies in the world producing so many different vehicles for us. We may never see another time where a great number of siblings like this will ever exist again, and that kind of makes me sad. But maybe the Chinese market will give us the sibling rivalries and the forgotten siblings of our future. How many of these great siblings can you remember, and how many do you remember seeing siblings? In some cases, we'd all just like to forget them, but like the rest of the family, they're here for life.
 
    So, if you like this podcast. Please like, share or comment about it on any major social feeds or streaming sites that you've found the AutoLooks podcast on, and after that, click the like button at the bottom. We have over 200 episodes across six seasons, with well more to come, and we release a new podcast every single week. So, follow us to find out more information, either from the auto looks podcast or to find out when that new episode hits the airways, from the auto looks podcast and podbean.com. So, like it, share it with your friends, send it to all your co-workers and share it with the boss down the road.
 
    Tell them, how many of these siblings do you have? Hell, I've noticed you have a car that I've never seen before and I'm pretty sure that's a sibling of a friend, kind of like. The first time I remember seeing I didn't know this, but the Chevy Malibu’s of like there you know, 1999, late 90s actually had an Oldsmobile cutlass variation of them once. I saw it once and I was like, yeah, there's a forgotten sibling. That inspired me years ago, almost 20 years ago, to do this podcast.
 
     So, after you like, share or comment about that, stop by the websites, read some of the ratings, check out some of our reviews and go to the Corporate Links website page to find all the car companies around the globe, big or small. We have them all on the AutoLooks.net website. Stop by check it out. And car companies from around the globe, big or small, we have them all on the AutoLooks.net website. Stop by check it out and click the like button at the bottom. The AutoLooks Podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by Podbeam.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. So, from myself, Everett Jay, the Ecomm Entertainment Group and Podbeam.com strap entertainment group in podbeam.com, strap yourself in for this one fun wild ride that those forgotten siblings are going to take us on.
 
Everett J.
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