Welcome back to Comment Of The Day! Every day, we read every single comment posted on our site and pick the one that made us laugh, get informed, or feel warm inside. You don’t have to go into our comments sections and write thousand-word stories about why you love a car so much, but a lot of you do, and that means a lot to us. So we’re highlighting some of the most excellent bits of thought that you’ve formed into words and digitized onto our website. In today’s open thread, we asked you “what car deserves to be its own brand?” Throughout history, automakers have spun models off into their own brands with varying success. The Dodge Ram is now just Ram, and it does pretty well for itself. In the pickup truck arms race, Ram routinely takes third place in sales, sometimes swapping places with Chevrolet for second. The Toyota Crown is also its own sub-brand, offering an entire line of cars from an executive sedan to that funky crossover that we do get on this side of the Pacific. A less-successful example would be Edsel, which fizzled out in relatively short order for an automaker. Smart was also sort of solo here in North America. At first, Smart was distributed by Penske Automotive Group, which set up a standalone dealership network outside of the Mercedes-Benz ecosystem. You could buy your Smart and get it serviced without ever seeing a three-pointed star. However, Mercedes-Benz took over distribution starting in 2010 and finishing in 2011. Part of the takeover involved closing down the standalone dealers and finally integrating Smart with Mercedes-Benz dealerships, just like how it is in much of the rest of the world. As Car and Driver reports, General Motors apparently plans on splintering off the Cadillac Escalade and the Chevrolet Camaro as sub-brands alongside the Corvette. That got us thinking, what other cars could be made into their own brands? We got a lot of good answers, here. But Halftrack El Camino pushed back, arguing that making beloved models into their own brands (and ultimately, crossovers) is nothing to get excited about. But what really wins COTD today is Halftrack‘s comment toward the end:
Wait, yeah, what happened to all of those cars?! When I do research for my Mercedes’ Marketplace Madness pieces, I often find that a single model of decades past had tons of body variations. The Golf example is a good one with the many body styles falling under the same nameplate. My favorite example is the Chevrolet Corvair. In its first-generation, the Corvair was available as a two-door coupe, a convertible, a four-door sedan, four-door station wagon, a passenger van, a commercial van, and two pickup trucks. Just to throw another out there, but the Chevy Vega was available as a sedan, a hatchback, a wagon, and a panel delivery. The Ford Focus is another. In its first-generation, you could get one as a three-door hatch, a four-door hatch, a sedan, or as a wagon. I’m sure you can think of more! [Editor’s Note: The two-door/four-door Wrangler and Bronco are cool, but that’s hardly inspired. There is a Wrangler pickup, too, so I guess that’s cool. -DT] This is perhaps worth looking into at a later date, but it really does seem that body variations have pulled back in the modern day. You might see a sedan version and a wagon version or the standard version and the performance model, and that’s it. I’m with Halftrack El Camino here, variations are cool!
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Want to write for The Autopian? Pitch us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage. I grew up in Volvo wagons (145S and 265GL). I haven’t tried to keep up with their models since then, but it’d be easier if they had the 140/240/260 nameplate/naming scheme (middle digit=number of cylinders, last digit=number of doors). And one of them plays second car in the car-adjacent recent indie flick Bellflower (the main car being a Buick Skylark that’s converted into a Mad Max style vehicle). America’s cheap gas (relative to Europe), slush-box requirement (put one in a 2-ton car with 100HP and you’ll wish you took the bus instead) and our dealer model (buy stuff off the lot today instead of speccing & ordering your own and wait a month), disdain for hatchbacks & wagons (and even sedans & coupes lately) with crossover/SUV soon being the ONLY body style, all probably contribute to our lack of body styles & engines options. I’m in the early stages of building out my Alltrack as more of a performance wagon, but I intend to keep the ride height pretty much stock as I find that little bit of extra ride height rather useful. Spacers and Atlas shocks seem to be the most common way to give your Alltrack a lift. You can get spacers that will maintain the correct front camber while lifting the car, and you can get strut extenders to maintain the correct damper travel. The Chevy Cavalier also comes to my mind – hatchback (in the early days), coupe, convertible, sedan, and wagon…GM’s ultimate cockroach car had you covered for pretty much everything short of professional work. Mazda: CX-30 – SUV Mazda3 – Sedan Mazda3 – Hatchback Toyota: Corolla – Sedan Corolla – Hatchback Corolla – Wagon Corolla Cross – SUV Prius (Prime) – Hybrid VW: Golf – Hatchback Jetta – Sedan Audi A3 Cabriolet – Convertible Golf Alltrack/Jetta Sportwagen – Station Wagon TT – Sports car VW Atlas/Audi Q3 – SUV Caddy/Transporter – Vans They’re all using the same platforms for multiple different cars that are essentially all the same, just not calling them the same name. VAG seems to be very good at doing this. I’m being nitpicky here, but in the chrome-bumper era of cars (especially in the US) many were available as a 4-door sedan or a 2-door sedan, both sharing a practical, squared-off roofline, as well as a 2-door coupe with a more sporty, tapered roofline. The JSW is still nice, but it’s fundamentally riding on a modified Mk5 platform, with a lot of cost cutting to achieve a lower price point. In my opinion Mk7 is peak Golf, with the right amount of tech (but not too much, like the Mk8), great looks, a good platform, and a huge world of mix-and-match parts from VW, Audi, and Porsche. I think the Mk7 Alltrack is a nice upgrade over the JSW, and even over the Mk7 Sportwagen. I’d be super interested to hear some opposing viewpoints, though! The fact my SW is a diesel/manual (options not available on Alltrack) is an extra point in its favor.. Perhaps if I was regularly going off-road the AT’s AWD would be something to consider, but for on-road I was never tempted. I am obligated to point out though that while the Alltrack never had a diesel option, it did get offered with a manual transmission. I just installed a short shift kit on mine yesterday! They’re both great machines, it just depends what you intend to do with them. My life does involve a certain amount of mild off-roading on construction sites and forest roads, so the extra clearance and standard skid plate matter to me. I don’t like the cladding, but I do like the silver bits. I could go on, but basically yeah I think your point was well made. Installation was just OK. There were no instructions in the box, and the ones I found online were both incomplete (didn’t tell you how to assemble the side-to-side bracket) and written for an older version of the product that had somewhat different parts. I was unable to find a really good YouTube video that covered the whole procedure start-to-finish. I figured it out, but it could have been better—quality instructions would take this from unnecessarily-frustrating to piece-of-cake. I also tore the inner rubber shift boot despite being super careful not to. If I did it again I’d just order a new boot and plan to destroy the old one. Construction on the unit seemed good, the materials are quality, but I don’t get a chubby just because someone used a CNC machine to mill their parts (show me your drop forge and I’ll get excited, but as far as I’m concerned billet is just the most practical way to make small-run steel parts, nothing more or less) so I don’t see anything super special about it. Plastic bits appeared to be mostly delrin, although I could be mistaken. The results are good, but not quite as good as I was hoping. My goal was to improve shift feel more than to shorten the shift action, and I found that the shift throws are actually shorter than I would prefer. There is still some slop in the system (don’t believe the forum people who will tell you that it makes the shifter feel “like a bolt-action rifle,” it’s still a cable-actuated system so it’s always going to be sloppy if you’re coming from a longitudinal-engined, RWD car with rod linkages) so with the gear locations so close together, I at first sometimes had to hunt around a little before finding the right slot. I got used to it though, and overall the shifts are still much crisper and notchier than the cream-of-wheat garbage that the stock setup offered. Not as crisp as my Miata, but very much improved from stock. Second gear takes more effort to get into than I’d like, but that may improve as the various moving parts get to know each other, or else possibly I need to adjust it a little. I plan to give it a week to break in before I fiddle with that. I already have a weighted shift knob helping me out (a Raceseng Slammer, which weighs well over a pound) so no chance of fixing the shift effort that way. Overall, I’d say it’s good but could be better. I was expecting better, frankly, based on reviews. Would another brand’s model be better still? Possibly, but I’m not really sure how. It’s really a pretty simple mechanism, I don’t see anything obvious to improve. If someone made a shift kit that preserved the stock shift throws but replaced all the polypropylene-and-rubber bullshit with steel and delrin, that would be my preference. They don’t, though. On the diesel SW I just installed the Euro shifter (shortens a bit the front-back movement) and replaced the crappy plastic endlinks with aluminum. By the way, the kit I received only replaced the front-to-back endlink. The stock side-to-side gets reused, albeit with a delrin bushing in place of the rubber. It looks like earlier versions replaced both endlinks, so it’s a little annoying that they no longer give you that piece.
