Cars

If you saw an Urba-anything in Mechanix Illustrated magazine in the 1970s-80s, it was a surely a design by Robert Q. Riley and David L. Carey of Quincy, AZ, doing business as Quincy-Lynn Enterprises. The UrbaCar seen here was their first design for the magazine.

VAZ is a Russian auto maker that began producing cars, in collaboration with Fiat, in the late 1960s. The Model 1111, commonly branded for export as a Lada Oka, was developed out of a need to replace the simple and cheap ZAZ Zaporozhets, the Russian “People’s Car”. It was to be the car that “every factory worker can afford”.

The Velorex was developed in Czechoslovakia in 1936 by two brothers who ran a bicycle shop.  After WWII, automobiles were very scarce and expensive, and the brothers realized the Velorex would be a cheap, affordable car for the masses.  They used a Jawa motorcycle engine, wheels, and brakes.

French industrial planner Jacques Riboud, of Vitrex Industrie, promoted and designed microcars as a solution to increased urbanization in 1970’s Paris. He believed full-size cars to be too big and too expensive for the old city’s infrastructure. 

The Volkswagen Beetle is a car we are all familiar with. More than 20 million were sold. While the name “Porsche” is associated with expensive cars, Ferdinand Porsche had a life-long interest in a small car that an average working person could afford. 

By 1993, Volkswagen’s North American sales had dropped to a mere 50,000 total units. Two VW designers, J Mays and Freeman Thomas, believed the key to future success was to resurrect the Beetle.

The Volkswagen XL1 was a two-seat, limited production, diesel-powered plug-in hybrid produced that VW introduced in 2014. Volkswagen was developing PHEV (Plug-In Hybrid Electric) technologies, and wanted to test them in real-world scenarios. While 250 examples were reportedly built, only 200 were made available for sale to the public.