FAMILIAR, YET DIFFERENT

AND ASIAN CARS HAVE THEIR devotees, American- vehicles had a real moment a few years ago, and Yank Tanks are well known worldwide, but forgotten are the native vehicles of Canada and Latin America. Often, these were derivatives of U.S. with local changes influenced by marketing, tariffs, and sales infrastructure. Now, our Spanish and Portuguese are não tão quente, so our burning desire to investigate the Ford Falcons of Argentina and the Willys Aero’s second life in Brazil (and their associated performance-car bona fides) remain unfulfilled, but Canadian brochures have long been readily accessible and usually in English, so they’ve always hung out there — familiar yet different, and vanishingly rare even if you grew up near the border.

General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler’s predecessors all had manufacturing plants in Canada as early as the 1910s. The big reason at that time was that it gave them tariff-free access to the whole of the British Empire by virtue of being Canadian-, rather than U.S.-built vehicles. For various geopolitical reasons the situation changed little until after World War II, and thus Canadians were given a number of American-styled and