Five Cars That Changed The World

Let's be honest, most cars are mass-market, trend-following, built-down-to-a-budget tripe. They're perfectly adequate for whatever task they're designed to do, but they do little more than ape whatever the current vogue is.

There aren't many cars that come along and change the game - that invent new sectors, new thinking and entirely new ways of building cars. We're here to celebrate five of those rarities...

Mazda MX-5

Back in the 1980s, the convertible sports car was dead. If you wanted to drive around while exposed to the elements, you were pretty much limited to either a Jaguar XJS, a BMW 3-series, a Vauxhall Astra or a Ford XR3i.

It took an American design studio and a Japanese company to resurrect it. Borrowing from the British tradition of the sports car - particularly the Lotus Elan - Bob Hall pitched the lightweight, front engined rear-wheel drive convertible concept to Mazda and the MX-5 was born.

Once dubbed "the best British sports car in the world" for its concept, the stupendous success of the MX-5 breathed new life into the sector. New competitors popped up and sold well and, before long, every manufacturer was taking a plasma cutter to the roof of anything they could find. The Boxster that kept Porsche out of VW's hands? Only possible through the success of the MX-5. The Elise that literally saved Lotus's life? Owes everything to the MX-5.

Almost all convertible cars you drive today owe their lives to the MX-5. And let's not forget that many other cars wouldn't exist if the manufacturers didn't sell something roofless to prop up the balance sheets. MX-5, we salute you.

Renault Espace

It's hard to imagine anything less inspirational than this Espace, but this thing created one of the biggest market sectors all by itself.

Many Americans will blanche at this statement. The first MPV, they'll point out, was the Dodge Caravan and it was Chrysler that invented it - and they'd be sort of right. The Caravan launched first - and in fact was predated by the Nissan Prairie, of all things - but the Espace was designed first (ironically by Chrysler-owned Matra) and has launched a thousand copies since.

The idea's a pretty basic one. Cars don't hold enough people and stuff if you can't work out when to stop having sex - but if you hollow out a van, give it windows and a car-ish interior, it'll hold plenty of people and stuff. The genius was to make it not as van-like to drive. Keeping the weight down - and the centre of gravity low - with extensive use of plastics in the body, the Renault was surprisingly car like to drive.

Pretty soon the Espace took off - its second full year of UK sales was nigh on 200,000 cars, and manufacturers clamoured to respond by building their own car-like vans. Today's market shows more than forty different MPV models for sale, just 20 years down the line from the Espace. Some makers even offer different kinds of MPV - Ford sell five! Anyone who's ever done a school run in the last five years can attest to their popularity too.

A nuisance they may be on the roads, but for every four Galaxies sold to a buyer with overactive loins, Ford can make one Focus ST - and that's fine by us.

Toyota Prius

This is a bitter old pill to swallow, but we've got a lot to thank the Prius for, despite everything.

Just look at it. Isn't it the dullest thing you've ever seen? And the whole, smug 'hybrid' thing about saving the planet? Yeah, we all know about the devastation caused by Canadian nickel mining to get the batteries for the damn thing. But the Prius is a trailblazer - and an exploitative one at that.

It does two main things to save fuel. The petrol engine powering it is an Atkinson Cycle one, which gets a more efficient fuel burn at the expense of torque. Replacing the torque - when you need it - is a battery pack which charges up when you slow down - it even makes the first bit of braking for you, saving on brake components. Add in an aerodynamically efficient body and low friction tyres, and the Prius sips fuel as it slips through the air.

The original was nowhere near as frugal as a diesel, but in California - land of the ecohippies - there's almost no such thing as a diesel road car. Even today there's a single-digit number of diesel models available. So the Prius was the most economical thing any of the Hollywood set had ever heard of, which meant they bought the things int their droves.

As diesel prices climbed higher in Europe, other manufacturers sat up and took notice. While Toyota (and Lexus) are still the hybrid trailblazer, General Motors, Nissan, Honda and even Porsche all now make hybrids - some of them getting really good mileages without being the generally unpleasant totems like the Prius. Nissan and Renault are also pursuing the pure electric car route, finally driving that tech down into reasonable money territory with the Leaf and ZOE.

Why is this a good thing? Well, the more fuel that's saved by someone who doesn't give a crap about driving, the more fuel is available for the rest of us to go nuts with - and Prius sales practically pay for the Toyota GT86's entire development. Exploiting eco-weenies so petrolheads can get a fix... I'd call that a win, wouldn't you?

BMC Mini

The original Mini is one of my all-time least favourite cars, but there's no denying its impact. Do you drive something small and front-wheel drive like a Fiesta or Corsa? You wouldn't do if it weren't for the Mini.

In the 1950s, if you wanted a small car, you bought a Renault 4CV or a VW Beetle. Maybe a FIAT 600, if you were crazy. If you wanted an economical car, you bought a bubble car - and you wanted an economical car, because fuel was rationed at the time. You couldn't buy a small car for your family and have an economical one at the same time.

BMC were a bit bored of the sight of ridiculous bubble cars on the roads and wanted to build a proper, small, economical car - one you could fit four people in, even if they weren't intimately familiar with each other (it wasn't the 60s yet). So they commissioned a design project for a car no more than 10 feet long and 4 feet wide that you could use 80% of the floorpan for luggage and people.

Enter Sir Alec Issigonis. His team designed the ADO15 - later to become the Mini - and took a radical departure from the standards of the day. Unlike all the other rear-engined, rear-wheel drive cars, the Mini's engine was put up front along with all the other mechanical gubbins to free up the back and a chunk of the middle of the floorpan for people and stuff. To fit it in the ten foot space, he had to turn it sideways and put the gearbox alongside it. A wheel went at each corner, so as not to take up valuable floorpan space and an entire design philosophy was born.

While Pat Moss was off winning rallies in the little thing, the rest of the world was sitting up and taking notice - and redesigning everything so it was front-wheel drive with a transverse engine. Whatever you drive today, if it's front-wheel drive, you owe its existence to the Mini.

Audi Quattro/Sport quattro

Back in the 1980s, you'd go camp in a forest - in Wales - for three days to watch this go past and simultaneously deafen you and sandblast your face, not knowing the impact it'd have 30 years later.

It was far from the first car to use 4WD - that honour falls on the 1966 Jensen FF - but it revolutionised rallying by being the first truly successful rally car to use it. In its first race - where it wasn't allowed to actually compete due to homologation issues - at the 1980 Algarve Rally, it would have won by half an hour from the rear wheel drive field.  In its first full season, it won the championship - with another win in 1984 and two seconds in 1983 and 1985. The various models racked up 29 WRC wins in total in 4 years for Mikkola, Mouton, Blomqvist and Rohrl.

As a response to the monster Audi, everything went four-wheel drive and it's been dominant in world rally ever since. But the Audi's importance isn't just for bringing 4WD to motorsports; it's for doing it to road cars. The Quattro was successful simply because on the loose surfaces of WRC, it didn't have to wait to get the power down. The RWD cars would power oversteer and the very talented drivers on board gathered it all up, while the Quattro would drag itself through.

While this applied well to race cars on gravel, it transferred to wet public roads and road cars - but since homologation rules of the day said the manufacturers had to make 200 examples for sale, they sunk millions into their rally projects and sold stupidly expensive halo cars to rich collectors. It wasn't until the rules changed to require largely road-car based entries that the effects were felt. Amongst the heirs to the Quattro's world rally crown was the Subaru Impreza and no sooner had Subaru UK decided to sell a detuned road model to the public than the 4WD road car craze exploded.

Soon, the Japanese manufacturers were nailing 4WD onto every one of their "276hp" cars to improve wet traction - the Impreza, Lancer Evolution, Skyline, GTO. The Europeans were in on it too, with the Escort RS Cosworth, Sierra XR4x4, Opel Calibra Turbo and Peugeot's mad 405 Mi16x4. As cars get more powerful and drivers get no more talented, 4WD has started to appear everywhere and many of the world's fastest cars are 4WD. Even Ferrari's gone a bit four wheel drive with the FF and the 4WD Bugatti Veyron showed the planet a clean pair of tailpipes, lending an air of death knell to rear driven cars...