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.