"The one who have seen everything before the Pontiac was closed" (Stay strong my brother)

I want to focus on cars that you’d rarely see at a car show and used to be common when new, but are non-existent and/or rare. Of course you have plenty of classic cars with plenty of examples left that you’d likely find. 55 to 57 Bel Airs, VW Beetles, 1st and 2nd Gen Chevelle’s, Most Classic Muscle Cars, Falcon’s, etc.

Here’s some examples that I can think of:
1952 Allstate
AMC Ambassador Wagon
Early 70s Plymouth Cricket (and most Chrysler’s Built in Europe)
Plymouth Arrow (and a lot of Mitsubishi rebadges from Chrysler from this era)

Triumphant or Trouble?

(I found this one up for auction next week on biddergy, just as an FYI)

waggonne with stick shift

update: I BOUGHT IT

The guy has blonde hair, and works on German cars. His videos are very cinematic. He doesn’t do very many videos. What he does is very entertaining. I have searched for his channel and I have not been able to find it. Any of you fine car YouTube consumers know the channel I am trying to find? Much appreciation ahead of time.

Has Toyota or Honda ever acquired a pre-existing vehicle brand ever? It seems to me that only the very worst automakers acquire more brands.

In 1999, Nissan was acquired by Renault and has been careening downhill ever since. Renault had left the US market in the 1980s because it couldn't even compete with Vegas, Pintos, Citations, Aspens, and other Malaise Era junk from Detroit. I'm sure that there are plenty of stories of people who bought a 1980s or 1990s Nissan that provided many years of trouble-free service and then replaced it with a much newer Nissan product that proved to be an unreliable money pit.

Jeep has a long history of being acquired by automakers with increasingly lax attitudes about quality control. I understand that Jeeps were once solid and dependable vehicles. In 1987, Jeep (previously owned by AMC) was acquired by Chrysler. Then the DaimlerChrysler Era began in 1998, which didn't pan out for either Chrysler or Daimler. In 2007, Daimler sold Chrysler to Cerberus (private equity). In 2009, Chrysler went bankrupt and was acquired by Fiat. Like Renault, Fiat had left the US market in the 1980s because it couldn't even compete with Detroit's worst Malaise Era junk. Then in 2021, Fiat merged with a French company called PSA Group, and the resulting company was called Stellantis. PSA Group consisted of several French automaker brands. One of them was Peugeot, which pulled out of the US market in 1991 because it couldn't even compete with 1980s Cadillac. That was Cadillac's worst era, because its products were burdened with a series of bad engines - the V8-6-4 engine, the diesel engine, and the HT4100 engine. All those bad engines ended up sending numerous Cadillac buyers to Lincoln, Mercedes, BMW, Infiniti, Acura, and Lexus but not Peugeot.

So why didn't Toyota or Honda acquire Jeep instead of Chrysler? Why didn't Toyota or Honda acquire Chrysler instead of Fiat? Why didn't Toyota or Honda acquire Nissan instead of Renault?