New Cars That Weren’t

The high cost of developing a new car from scratch often means plenty of overlaps between different generations of the same model. It’s traditionally been rare for a new arrival to be fresh in every way, with a brand new platform and never-before-seen technology. At the other extreme, however, have been new-model launches that are little more than well-disguised facelifts of their predecessors.

Some are obvious, of course. Nobody looking at the Morris Ital in 1980 could have missed its uncanny likeness to the old Marina. And anyone checking out the new Rover Metro in 1990 would soon have deduced that it was a facelifted version (albeit thoroughly re-engineered) of the Austin Metro from a decade earlier.

Others, however, were arguably more successful in their disguise of an elderly model; the TR6 of 1967 looked drastically more ‘macho’ than its TR5 predecessor, for example, despite it being little more than an updated derivative. So, check out our top choices of new cars that weren’t ‘all new’ – and don’t forget to drop us a line with some of your own suggestions.