Biggest improvement between a car and its direct successor

[Timberwolf]

Thinking about this from the dismal cars thread: Ford replaced the Mk6 Escort with the Mk1 Focus, and with that model change went from one of the worst cars in its class to one of the best. In almost every aspect the Focus was massively better. Handling and ride being the biggest improvements but refinement and interior quality (not even seen as a Focus strong point these days!) were also a big step up.

Are there any other times where a manufacturer has made a like-for-like replacement of an outgoing model with a car that is hugely better? Any even more so than the Escort to Focus?

[Timberwolf]

I think for modern ones where the basic template in each segment is fairly set and new models are mostly generational improvements it's a hard one to beat.

I was wondering if there'd be a few around the '80s and the shift from old RWD, live-axle chassis to FWD and aero styling - amid a few moans of well-loved models being replaced by something blander.

[Timberwolf]

Beetle to Golf is a good one, such a radical change it's easy to forget it was intended as another attempt at the replacement VW had been trying to make in various forms since the '50s.

On the same lines Type 4 to B1 Passat is quite a leap, although not quite so extreme a difference.

[Timberwolf]

mac96 said:

It would be really hard to argue that FWD was not better than RWD for ordinary cars back in the 1960s. Especially if you wanted drive in a straight line on the new motorways on breezy days, or fit more people into a small car. Or drive in snow.
Not everyone drives for pleasure, or to explore the limits of handling. And anyway few cars are more fun than an Austin Mini!

Even in terms of handling - cheap mass market stuff was happily out there being crap long before the transverse FWD layout became the go-to packaging option, and leaf-sprung live axle setups designed for cheapness and ease of maintenance and engineered to doggedly understeer until the point at which they suddenly didn't weren't exactly the last word in vehicle dynamics.

It's quite a surprise to anyone who grew up with BMW advertising flogging the benefits of rear-wheel drive to see ads from the '60s and '70s which talk about front-wheel drive as more agile, more responsive and benefiting from "the feeling of the drive wheels pulling you through the corner". The smaller BMC cars certainly had the reputation of being a decent drive, although how much of that was the wheel-at-each-corner nature and Issigonis' determination to make cars he personally liked rather than what actually appealed to buyers and how much was the drive configuration is up for debate.

(Also a lot of the disadvantages of FWD in modern, heavy, high-powered stuff simply didn't apply in an era when 50bhp was considered pretty normal and that'll-do-nicely-thank-you)

[Timberwolf]

stickleback123 said:

I do wonder what'll happen to E Type values when all the old boys who love them and pay £100k for them die. There are LOADS of them out there, they're bloody awful things to drive, and if you didn't covet one as a kid why would you want one as an adult.

I suppose it'll become another bullst speculator market where it has value as a currency, irrespective of it's (lack of) merit as a car.

I don't know that much about it but I've heard grumbles from the prewar and early postwar car scene that interest in the regular everyday cars has really fallen off in the last decade or so, even when the big classic car YouTubers cover them people skip over the videos. I wouldn't be surprised for that to extend into the '50s and '60s as the supply of people who remember seeing them on the road or having relatives who owned one dries up.

Whether the E-Type is iconic enough and has appeared in enough films and TV to escape that is another question... and probably rather a different one for an early Series 1 convertible than it is for a late Series 3 2+2.