The world’s most influential cars

But occasionally something comes along that causes shockwaves; nowadays such products and brands are called disruptors, because they shake up the market leading to new ways of thinking. Such marketing speak was a long way into the future when most of these influential cars were dreamed up but that doesn’t diminish the fact that they all had an impact, often felt for decades to come:

The Model T isn’t here because it was a particularly revolutionary car – it wasn’t. But the way it was produced completely rewrote the rules.  However, while everybody assumes the Model T was the first mass-produced car, it wasn’t – that was the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, 19,000 examples of which were built between 1901 and 1907. It was the affordable Ford which really made mass-production work though; at one point, over half of the cars on America’s roads were Model Ts.

Until 1923, all cars featured a separate chassis to give the bodyshell much-needed strength – then came the Lancia Lambda, with its monocoque construction. Stronger, lighter and cheaper to build, monocoque – or unitary – construction wouldn’t be universally adopted by mainstream car makers until the 1960s. That’s how advanced the Lambda was.

The fact that it wasn’t a commercial success meant rival car companies initially weren’t keen to copy its aerodynamic styling too closely, but the Chrysler Airflow was still hugely influential. This was the car that switched designers on to the fact that for a car to be truly efficient it had to cleave the air rather better than everything that came before; by the post-war years the Airflow’s sleeker design had become the norm.

Glassfibre (not Fibreglass, which is a brand name) was the wonder material of the 1950s. It allowed low-volume companies to offer bodyshells to reclothe pre-war cars that had rotted away. Meanwhile, in the US Chevrolet was busy building the world’s first production car with a glassfibre bodyshell – a move that would be copied around the globe by lots of other sports car makers.

Although Jaguar was the first car maker to fit a modern design of disc brake to its C-Type racer, it was Citroën which brought such technology to the road, with its avantgarde DS. With its power-assisted in-board disc brakes at the front, the DS enjoyed stopping power like no car before; within a year, Triumph was also using disc brakes on its TR3.

The Mini wasn’t especially advanced technically; everything incorporated in this tiny marvel had been seen elsewhere before. What the Mini did offer was blend several key technologies into one affordable cutting-edge package with its transverse engine and front-wheel drive. Soon after the car’s arrival in 1959, the microcar market had been killed off, as the Mini did everything bigger and better, often at a lower price.

The Chevrolet Corvair was influential for all the wrong reasons. GM skimped on the rear suspension design which could lead to the driver losing control in an emergency manoeuvre. Activist Ralph Nader latched onto this and he made it his mission to make cars safer; his book ‘Unsafe at any speed’ led directly to the setting up of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration which tightened up the rules around car design and production.

In 1958 the first mid-engined Formula One cars lined up on the grid. Four years later, the same technology reached the road, with Bonnet’s Djet, to create a car with perfect balance. Those mid-mounted mechanicals were all borrowed from Renault to keep costs down, while the light and narrow glassfibre body ensured superb agility. In the coming years all the best sportscars would follow the Djet’s mid-engined formula.

The Mustang was dubbed Ford’s pony car; an affordable sporting machine that could be tailored to suit the owner’s pocket and tastes. When it went on sale in 1964 the Mustang soon became the fastest-selling car in history, which is why it didn’t take long for Ford’s rivals to want a piece of the action. Before we knew it buyers had a much bigger choice of pony cars while the Mustang’s success led directly to the creation of the Capri for Ford of Europe.

Think sixties American car and you think V8-powered coupé with massive power. Or in other words, muscle car. This is where it all started; the Pontiac GTO of 1964. At first the GTO wasn’t a model in its own right; it was an option package on the Tempest, but by 1966 Pontiac was marketing the GTO as a stand-alone model. Next thing we knew, a whole industry had sprung up around the muscle car.

Citroën was the first to offer a front-wheel drive hatchback with its 1939 Traction Avant Commerciale. But the concept didn’t really take off and it was Renault that made the hatchback a commercial success with its 16 of 1965. This was the first mainstream, affordable front-driven hatch and it created a template that’s now used around the globe by every mainstream car maker.

This feature could have been filled with Volvos, the company has introduced so many safety-related firsts, such as the three-point front seatbelt in 1959. In 1966 came the first crumple zones in the 140-Series; it took a while, but in time such safety features would become crucial to car buyers – and save millions of lives.

NSU had introduced its Wankel Spider in 1964, but the Ro80 was the car which took rotary engine technology and made it relatively mainstream. Sadly NSU couldn’t make the engine work reliably, and the company was bankrupted as a result, leading to a buy-out by VW. If that doesn’t sound like a great legacy, we have the Ro80 to thank for its wind-cheating design; it took aerodynamics to a whole new level.

Spyker had offered a four-wheel drive car as early as 1903, but it wasn’t until the Jeep of 1941 that mass-produced 4x4s became a reality. That was the thing about four-wheel drive; it was for utilitarian vehicles. Influenced by the Jeep Wagoneer of a few years earlier, the Range Rover of 1970 took the luxury SUV recipe and moved the game on. Here was a luxury car that could go almost anywhere. Today, the Range Rover is still on top of its game and it looks like an all-new fifth generation version will continue that theme.

The problem with engines that feature just a pair of valves per cylinder, is that you can have either low-down torque or high-end power, but not both. Fit a quartet of valves to each cylinder, and you can have your cake and eat it – as Triumph found when it introduced the first mass-made four-valve-per-cylinder engine in 1973, in its Dolomite Sprint. Once again, it would take a while to catch on, but 16-valve engines would become the norm more than a decade later. PICTURE: late model

Hatchbacks were always meant to be practical family cars; the idea of crossing one with a sportscar didn’t make sense, until a team of Volkswagen engineers created a hot Golf in their spare time. When the Golf Sport was shown as a project at the 1975 Frankfurt motor show, VW’s management was taken by surprise at the reaction. The hot hatch had been born and it wouldn’t take long for a raft of imitators to arrive.

The Saab 99 wasn’t the first turbocharged car; that had arrived 16 years earlier with the short-lived Oldsmobile Jetfire while the BMW 2002 Turbo and Porsche 911 Turbo both pre-dated it. What the 99 did was take the technology mainstream and refined it so that a turbocharged car could be driven on an everyday basis.

The Quattro may not have been the world’s car with first four-wheel drive, but it was the first to match such technology with serious performance. The Quattro would go on to dominate rallying leading to a raft of other high-performance cars with 4WD, from the Citroën BX and Peugeot 405 to the Lancia Delta Integrale and Subaru Impreza.

In 1984 Renault would come up with Europe’s first people-carrier, but the previous year Chrysler had introduced the world’s first, in the form of the Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager. Offering seating for seven with interior flexibility like never before, few would have guessed how influential – and massively popular – these vehicles would become. This class of car today has largely been supplanted by the SUV – where a seven seat configuration is very popular.

The BMW wasn’t the first powerful saloon car but it did introduce a concept that has become much-copied since it arrived. When BMW introduced the first M5, based on the second-generation 5-Series saloon (the E28), few could have seen what the company had unleashed. While those early cars packed all of 286bhp, what made the M5 so intriguing was the fact that it looked barely more sporty than a 518i – it was the definition of a sleeper.

You can’t move now for seven-seat SUVs with three rows of forward-facing seats, but it was the Discovery that introduced us to the concept of a go-anywhere people-carrier. Sure there had been SUVs before (including the original Discovery of 1989) with pop-down occasional seats in the boot, but when the Discovery 2 made its debut in 1994 it featured flip-up seats with modern levels of safety and comfort – an idea that has since become much copied but never quite equalled.

Following on from the success of the full-sized MPV a decade earlier, Renault came up with a notion that was initially rather popular – the compact MPV that could seat seven without the need for a parking space the size of a football pitch. Based on the Megane platform (and early cars were called Megane Scenic to reflect this), the Scenic was really a 5+2. It didn’t take long for rivals to launch their own take on the formula and they sold well until their market was stolen by a raft of SUVs which could invariably seat only five.

Before the Rav4 made its debut there had been plenty of rugged off-roaders with four-wheel drive; the Land Rover Defender, Suzuki SJ and multiple Jeeps all pre-dated it for example. Plus there was also Toyota’s own Land Cruiser, but it was the Rav4 that wrapped everything up into one very usable package so the benefits of an off-roader were combined with the efficiency of a compact hatch. Today the model is one of the world’s best-selling cars.

It may have featured awkward styling and limited practicality in its original guise, but the Prius created a hybrid template that is becoming the norm. First sold in 1997, the Prius was two years ahead of any rival – the next to come along was Honda with its futuristic-looking Insight. In 2030, the hybrid car will be the only type of fossil-fuel car you’ll be allowed to buy in the UK.

The crossover market has been booming seemingly for ever, but the Qashqai is credited with being the car that started the craze. In effect it took the compact SUV formula and refined it further, adding versatility and efficiency so that buyers could enjoy the benefits of an SUV but with lower running costs. From the second generation of this car onwards this car has been sold as the Rogue Sport in North America.

Since the Nissan Leaf burst onto the scene and in that time the EV landscape has changed immeasurably. Even now too many EVs are based on cars originally designed to run on fossil fuel, but the Leaf showed that with a clean-sheet design it’s possible to build a pure-electric family car that’s space-efficient, good to drive, affordable, and, for urban dwellers at least, a tolerable range.

With its 250+ mile single-charge range this was the first electric car that could comfortably fit into most owners’ lives. Supercar-like performance was the icing on the cake. Ten years after its arrival, Tesla’s mainstream rivals are still playing catch up, but make no mistake: this is the car that truly started the move to the EV future.