A good link here with quite a few photos of identical copies. Everything form Daewoo Matiz to BMW 7 Series and Coaches tinyurl.com/d7967y
In terms of pure copying, the BMW is by far the worst executed of all that lot, it is jaw droppingly hideous.
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I looked up a bit more on the ill-fated Lea Francis Lynx, the car that made the Edsel look like a runaway success!
Another story, maybe part of the same one, is that Lea-Frances was keen to emulate some of the stylish Italian sports car designs. The boss wanted something evocative of a catamaran too. In the end a cartoonist helped with the styling (I kid you not). The Jaguar Mk 10 bit was told to me by someone who worked for another luxury car maker at the time!
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I forget what the model was called, but there was a Lea-Francis two-seater with a curved radiator grille in production for the company's last couple of years. Like all post-war Lea-Francises its styling was a bit awkward, but it wasn't bizarre like the prototype in the link photo.
I don't think many were sold however. Basically Lea-Francis were a vintage car manufacturer, building a very small number of cars by hand, hanging on long after most of their small-volume 'quality' contemporaries had been taken over by corporations or gone out of business. The two that spring to mind are Wolseley and Riley (Austin-Morris/BMC) but one could add Sunbeam-Talbot and Humber (Rootes Group). Another quality car maker, Armstrong-Siddeley, lasted into the early sixties and made latterly some very rapid large saloons. The remnants of Daimler, owned at that time by BSA, at the last minute made the very quick V8-powered Majestic Major before being amalgamated with Jaguar and becoming Jag clones.
Lea-Francis cars were old-fashioned but well made and quite rapid for their day. Owners liked them a lot. I wonder if anyone else has ever been in one?
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So in the Soviet European Union we're all going to troll around in washing-machine-motor powered plastic Noddy cars, whilst the peasants 'destroy the world' with copies of the most opulent cars we're expected to give up? You couldn't make it up!
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I saw one of those Micra-based MKII Jag copies last year. It fooled me for about 5 seconds from about 50 yards away. I decided in the end it looked fun!
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A neighbour has one of them too fooled me for about 1 second but the Micra's dash and doors and even front wings gave it away. Very cleverly done though forget the maker but it begins with M.
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