DESIGN ICONS
John Simister reveals six magnificent design classics that you can bag for Kuga money…
Design experts often point to landmark cars and reverently point out what makes them masterpieces of the automotive style statement. A Jaguar E-type with its streamlined shape. A Daytona for making front-engined Ferraris muscularly desirable again. A Citroën SM for being a futuristic GT without denying its DS ancestry. A Lamborghini Miura for its exotic supercarness.
So entrenched are such cars as markers of magnificent design that they have become highly expensive. It’s what happens when well-heeled folk with an eye for ‘good design’ keep demand ahead of supply. But it doesn’t have to be like this.
We’ve found six cars that each make a big enough style statement to merit a place in any treatise on car design – and ensure you’re never short of conversation at a car show. They will mark you out as daringly design-savvy, yet won’t break the bank. They represent design democratised, which sounds good to us. Turn over to see how they shape up…
1971 RENAULT 16 TL
Renault, populated by free-thinking creatives and requiring a riposte to its rival, the Citroën DS, came up with the Renault 16. Like the DS, and Renault's own R4 launched four years before the R16, the new car featured front-wheel drive with the gearbox in front of the longitudinal engine. In true Gallic style, it featured soft, long-travel but well-damped suspension and supremely soft, snug seats. The UK ads featured the R16 as an example of the French concept of quiétude. And, being a new French car in 1965, it did things differently while flaunting logic and practicality. That secures its place as a design statement today.
Here are just some of those differently-done things. A different wheelbase left and right, simply so the rear suspension's transverse torsion bars (one per trailing arm) can sit one in front of the other. The bonnet release, hidden in plain sight: you squeeze together two little vertical bars, ostensibly part of the front grille. Headlights whose aim is adjusted with obvious external levers next to the lenses. And, most R16-specific of all, those deeply-ridged roof edges, the roof itself set below outer peaks whose cross-section contributes significantly to the R16's strength.
Inside this 1971 example, there's a similar disconnect with the conventions of the time. The dashboard, all padded vertical ridging, drops straight down from the base of the windscreen
