Cars That Made Me Care About Cars
I owned one car on this list, a Renault Twingo, and the rest I’ve only ever wanted, carried in my head since I was a kid.
What they share is a shape you can sketch from memory and a reason to exist beyond getting from one place to another. They’re mostly from before 2000, and I could blame nostalgia for that, but I think the reason is more boring, because after 2000 aerodynamic optimisation and safety regulation pushed the whole industry towards the same optimal shape, so the cars got better and got harder to tell apart.
The Sculptors
Some cars you notice from across a car park, even the small and quiet ones (no wrap, no spoiler, nothing grotesque), because someone thought about the shape before asking how it would sell. You can’t ignore that kind of beauty, and you can’t quite explain it away either.
Citroën DS — DS23, 1972
Nothing in 1955 looked like this, and nothing in 2026 does either. Flaminio Bertoni sculpted it in clay, with his hands, and the result landed at the Paris Motor Show like something that had taken a wrong turn from the future. Citroën reportedly took around 12,000 orders on the first day and close to 80,000 by the end of the show, and you can understand why.
The hydropneumatic suspension was the engineering headline, and you could lose a wheel and keep going on three, with the suspension adjusting in real time. But what stays with you is how it moves, because it floats, as though gravity has agreed to make an exception for it. The DS has a calm, unhurried certainty about it that no contemporary car matched and very few since have come close to.
The DS23 is the peak of that idea. Citroën fitted it with a 2.3-litre engine producing around 115 horsepower, and offered the DS23ie with Bosch fuel injection, among the first mass-production cars to have it. The car had been on sale since 1955 and in 1972 was still ahead of everyone else.
Roland Barthes understood this in Mythologies, 1957: “I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
The DS line ended in 1975 with the DS23 as its final form, and nothing overtook it.
Mercedes 280SL Pagoda — W113, 1969
Paul Bracq and Béla Barényi designed the W113 in 1963, and they gave it a concave roof that dips towards the cabin like the tiles on a Japanese pagoda, which is where the name comes from. That single decision is why you recognise one instantly.
The rest of the car is as restrained as the roof is unusual, and it holds your attention the moment you give it, with the calm of something that knows exactly what it is.
The 280SL was the last and most resolved version, introduced in 1967 to replace the 250SL, and its 2.8-litre straight-six made 170 horsepower, smoothly and without any fuss. The 1969 model sits in the middle of that run, when everything had settled.
What gets you in the end is how complete it is, because every line arrives where it should and there’s nothing you’d want to add or take away.
Fiat X1/9 — 1500 Series, 1979
The X1/9 was designed to be enjoyable and nothing else: mid-engine, targa roof, good lines, fun to drive on an ordinary afternoon, and no interest at all in being a status object. The Porsche 914 had the same layout and so, later, did the Pontiac Fiero, but the X1/9 had a cleanliness the others never had, and it looked considered where they looked assembled.
Marcello Gandini drew it for Bertone, the same man who did the Lamborghini Miura and the Countach, and the X1/9 cost a fraction of either, as if to prove that a mid-engine targa didn’t need a Lamborghini budget or a Lamborghini ego. The 1500 Series arrived in 1978 with a 1.5-litre engine replacing the original 1.3, giving 85 horsepower and better torque through the rev range. That won’t impress anyone on paper, and it’s still fast enough to be fun, which is what matters.
The X1/9 is not a great car, and the reliability is period-correct Italian, but it looks like something that should exist, which most cars don’t.
VW Golf I Cabriolet — 1982
Karmann converted the Golf I into a cabriolet in 1979, and the result ran until 1993, fourteen years with no meaningful redesign, because Volkswagen looked at what they had and decided it was right.
By 1982 the early production issues had been sorted and the hood mechanism was reliable, and the 1.6-litre engine made 75 horsepower, which was plenty for what it was there to do. On paper it was a small front-wheel-drive hatchback with the roof off and a roll bar across the middle (the Germans called it the Erdbeerkörbchen, the strawberry basket), and nothing about it was expensive or remarkable.
What it gave you was the road with the roof gone, and you didn’t need more than that. It was affordable, practical and everywhere, and it never asked you to earn the freedom it offered. Some cars impress you into feeling free, and this one just took the ceiling off and let you drive.
Renault Twingo I — 1992, owned 2006
Jean-Pierre Ploué drew the Twingo for Patrick Le Quément as one unbroken gesture, a monobox with no crease lines and nothing to interrupt the curve from windscreen to hatch, and with headlamps that made it look as if it was smiling at you.
When Raymond Lévy, Renault’s president, first saw the finished car, he smiled back at it, and Le Quément told him: “It’s a car that, when it rains or freezes, you don’t leave in the street. You take it under your arm and put it down in the warmth in front of the fireplace.”
He was talking about it like a pet, which was the whole idea, and he was right.
The shape barely changed in fifteen years because it didn’t need to. Mine was a late first-gen, a 2006 in Gris Boréal, Initiale Paris with every option Renault put on the list. I treated it well and it served me well during my single days, when I had just moved to France. Then I got married, we had a first child, then a second, and by then the car was my wife’s, so she kept driving it for a long time. But two children in a Twingo becomes something you manage rather than something that works, so we chose something bigger. The Twingo didn’t fail us, we outgrew it.
Honda Civic — 3rd generation, 1985
The 3rd-generation Civic arrived in 1983, boxy, angular and precise, with clean panel gaps, rectangular headlights and lines that went where they were supposed to go and stopped there. Japanese car design in the mid-1980s had found its own language, and the Civic spoke it more clearly than most.
I saw one as a kid and something clicked, the precision of it and the honesty of the angles, and I think that’s where it started, my preference for cuts over curves and geometry over decoration, and all it took was a hatchback.
The Si variant ran a 1.5-litre 12-valve SOHC engine producing 91 horsepower in a car that weighed around 900 kilograms, and Honda built on what it had proved with the first-generation Civic (the CVCC engine, which met US emissions rules without a catalytic converter in 1975) without making a fuss about it. By 1985, Western manufacturers had stopped dismissing Japan and started copying it.
The Engineers
Others you respect before you love, because their beauty is underneath, in what the engineers decided to do and how they made it work, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.
Mini Cooper S — 1967
James May once said the Mini was “the most important car ever made, not the best,” and he was right, because the achievement is fitting something that raced and won into something that small, which makes the compactness the design.
Alec Issigonis did it in 1959 with front-wheel drive, a transverse engine and ten-inch wheels, and to make the gearbox fit he put it directly under the engine, in the sump, which nobody had done before. That left 80% of the floor space for passengers and luggage. The Cooper S took the same package, added a 1,275cc engine, twin SU carburettors and 76 horsepower, and won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1964, 1965 and 1967.
And then there’s The Italian Job, three Minis through the sewers of Turin, down staircases and across rooftops, tough and precise and unstoppable, and then Mr Bean’s Mini, battered and wronged by the world and never quite beaten. It’s the same tiny car, and it turned out to be capable of two completely different things.
Audi 100 C2 — 1979
A family member had one, the CC, the special edition at the top of the range, and as a kid I remember sitting in it and feeling the weight of the thing: the interior, the quiet, the sense that everything had been thought about. The ride was composed, the 2.0-litre diesel inline-five turning over slowly and pulling without effort, and at speed the whole car seemed to gather itself instead of straining. And long trips in that white car were where part of my musical taste was formed, though I only understood that much later.
The C2 generation ran from 1976 to 1982, and the inline-five it introduced, 70 horsepower with that offbeat five-cylinder warble, became the signature of Audi’s engineering character for the next two decades. The interior finish was imposing without being showy, because this was Audi before it decided it was a luxury brand, when the quality was already there and the branding hadn’t caught up yet.
Mercedes-Benz W123 — Phase 3, 1982
A family member had one. As a kid I watched him maintain it himself, because the car made that possible: it was simple to work on and honest about what was wrong. He never looked worried about it, and the car never gave him reason to be.
The 240D and 300D diesels are routinely documented at 500,000 kilometres on their original engines with minimal intervention. Mercedes built the Phase 3, the final and most refined version, with the 3.0-litre diesel producing 88 horsepower, to last longer than any commercial logic required. The engineers apparently found the alternative unacceptable.
What struck me as a kid was the timelessness of it. The kind of car that looks correct in any decade because it was built around what a car should do, not what it should look like that year. You keep it for twenty years and it still looks remarkable. That’s what it felt like. And that feeling stayed.
Nissan Patrol Gen 3 — MQ/MK series, 1980
As a kid in Kuwait I saw these crossing the desert like it was a car park, without drama or strain, doing exactly what they were built for in conditions that would end most other vehicles, and the word that came to my mind then was unbeatable.
Under the body there were solid axles front and rear, an SD33 inline-six diesel and a transfer case built to last indefinitely, and the Gen 3 Patrol made no compromise for comfort and none for refinement, because every engineering decision pointed at the same goal: go anywhere, survive it, come back. That’s why it was everywhere, as the default vehicle for people who needed something that would not fail them, and almost never as an off-road toy.
It was a tank that wore its capability as ordinary clothes.
BMW 318i — E30, 1991
I came across the E30 as a teenager and something registered without fully forming, an ordinary car that carried itself differently, and years later, when I understood the engineering behind it, I realised the impression had been right all along.
It was a small saloon with a 1.8-litre four-cylinder, 113 horsepower and rear-wheel drive, in a body that looked exactly like what it was, a driver’s car that happened to seat four. It was useful every day and still looked sporty, with nothing wasted to get there, and BMW found that balance once and has spent the four decades since trying to find it again.
Cinema & Memory
Some cars got to me before I understood what a car was, through a screen, a poster, or a toddler’s-eye view of a car park. At that age you have no way to explain what you’re looking at, you only know whether it does something to you, and these four did.
Ford Mustang — 1968 fastback
Before I saw the film, I saw the poster, with the Highland Green car on San Francisco streets and Steve McQueen behind the wheel, looking like someone who has somewhere to be and intends to get there. It works on you before you know anything about the car.
Bullitt came out in 1968, and its chase through San Francisco is ten minutes of a 390 cubic inch V8 (6.4 litres, 325 horsepower) doing things that made the rest of the film secondary to the car, which owns every frame of that scene.
The 1968 fastback body, with the long hood, the short deck and the roofline that sweeps back and drops, is one of those shapes that photographs like it was designed to be photographed, and this muscle car arrived at the exact moment American cinema discovered that a car could be a co-star.
Peugeot 403 — 1959
My father’s first car was a 403. There are photos of me next to it, small enough that the wheel arch reaches my shoulder. I also remember the inside: so much space it felt like a room. That’s all I have, and it stayed.
Pininfarina designed it. Coming after the 203, the 403 was boxy, upright, purely functional, and still a statement of intent: French family motoring could have grace, could be done with taste, and lose none of its practicality on the way.
Chevrolet Caprice — 1980
The Caprice looks like a child’s drawing of a car. You know the one: big rectangle, four circles, two lines for windows. From the side it’s so long and so flat that you struggle to tell which end is the front, and by almost any objective measure it’s a design that doesn’t try.
And yet there is something about it. The bench seat is wide enough that I once joked to a friend it had a dedicated spot just for your hand, and then there’s the V8 and the sheer bulk of the thing moving down a road, a family sedan taken to a logical extreme that shouldn’t work but somehow does. Every taxi, every police cruiser, every American road trip in every film from the 1970s to the 1990s had one somewhere in frame.
I have always smiled when I see one, and I still smile now when one turns up on screen. It’s almost tasteless and entirely itself, and at that size, honesty becomes its own kind of dignity.
BMW 850i — E31, 1989
I grew up watching Knight Rider. I loved KITT, but I never loved the car underneath it. The Trans Am had an aggression to it, a muscle-car bravado that felt too loud for what I wanted, which was something sleek, purposeful and precise, fast without needing to look it.
Then I saw a black E31 as a kid, and that was enough.
The 850i carried a 5.0-litre V12 producing 300 horsepower, BMW’s most ambitious engine at the time, shared with the 750i saloon. The body, designed under Claus Luthe, sat low and wide with a long bonnet and a roofline that swept cleanly to the rear. The electronics were overambitious for 1989 and gave early cars trouble, but BMW was building something extraordinary and knew it.
It looks neither old nor new, only correct, sporty without any of the aggression, and it’s the car I wanted instead of the Trans Am, the one that proved I was right to want it.
I owned one car on this list, the Twingo, and it was enough.
Every now and then I look at 280SL listings, and the prices are always too high, so I always close the tab. One day, maybe. Probably not.
The others I see occasionally, on a street, at a light, in a car park somewhere unexpected, and I always stop and smile: at a DS that still seems to float even when it’s parked, at the sweep of an E31 in the dark. I think about the people who drew these things, the engineers who made them work, and the ones who believed a car could be more than transport.
