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My family's car growing up in the '60s was a 1959 VW bus. My dad set it up as a camper for all seven of us to sleep in, and it hauled us from California to Colorado and back more than once, as well as a trip to the Seattle Worlds Fair.
Early air-cooled VWs are still quite popular here, even more than SOHC Hondas. 
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Scottly, if you had read on the
origin of the VW van, meaning, the chasis it was based on, you would realise what an inferior design it was.
Have you never wondered what the engine was doing... in the
rear?! Isn't it there, where one is supposed to load the cargo?!
Its handling was outright dangerous and many owners have lost their lives in it. Where I lived, the greengrocer and his eldest son were two of them. The only good thing, one can say: it was dead cheap and the only excuse for its poor quality was: WW2 had just ended.
Here two pictures of another dead cheap car, but... contrary to that VW van, its design was ge-ni-al.
In spite of being dead cheap, it nonetheless had independent suspension. Not that many American much bigger cars of that era came even close in this respect. Let me degress here a bit. It's about show vs. quality
I was still in highschool when the Mustang was launched, the car that you Americans loved so much. I remember the review I read in a German car magazine in those years.
"Well, well, what have we here" the German test team wondered.
They flipped the car over to have a closer look.
"What is this?! Spring leafs!? A solid rear axle?!"
"A
sportscar?! Hah, not even close, it is not even a spor-ty car. What it is instead, is an ordinary Ford Falcon that... got lipstick on." There's your lipstick, Scottly. The Americans offcourse loved the showboat, but not the Europeans. In spite they were even assembled in The Netherlands for a wile, sales remained low. You know, Europeans mistrust show. They don't want showboats as politicians either. They prefer dull persons as long as they know their business.
Now back to that little French van with its wonderful independent suspension. Also France was ruined by the war, so a car had to be austere. Realise that for the 2CV, the car this van was based on, there was a
six year waiting list and even then there was priority for doctors and vets...
Here's an example of that ingenuity. Citroën reasoned: no need for separate front indicators, the one towards the rear can serve as both rear, side and front indicator. License plate light? Ha, another opportunity to save a bulb, by having just one light in the middle with glass in each side. Brake lights? Just one will do. And don't you love that rear bumper? Wow, there's even two of them!
That 2CV was loved by millions and millions. My brother had the one in the pic in a later version to transport his saxophones. Later he had the 'convertible'
. It was sooo simple, economical and genial in its design. Robust and reliable too. I have seen a couple succesfully crossing the Sahara desert in one, not that they could carry much more weight than their sleeping bags and toothbrushes in it, mind you, but they made it. They had the later version which had a 26HP 435cc boxer instead of the once original 9 HP 375cc one.
Check this wonderful British understatement advertisement from 12:45 - 13:05 in the The Car's the Star.
Just see the fun we had.
You may say it's a crappy car, but, hey, it did what it had to do and above all: it did not pretend. What an intelligent design! That's ingenuity. That's the quality
I love.
All those American sportscars shown here, never were succesful here. Not many people wanted to be seen in it. Such cars were associated with vulgar, pimps and men suffering from an inferiority complex. And nowadays it's the same with your trucks. With a few exceptions, people dislike trucks like the Dodge Ram. What a waste of raw materials!
Europeans favour Porsches. Less show, but good quality instead. The same for trucks. People here prefer Toyota Landcruisers.
These American sports cars were ok... as long as you kept going in a straight line, which seems to have always been the ideal of American driving. See that film by Monte Hellman, what was it called?
Two-Lane Blacktop or something?
