A look back at some of the forgotten car collabs and rebadged 4x4s

Sharing of vehicle platforms – and even entire vehicles – is nothing new in the automotive industry. It just seems more prevalent these days as development and manufacturing costs escalate and some manufacturers run out of fresh ideas.

My first memory of it was riding the bus to school and seeing the shiny new Ford Mavericks on the lot at Fury Ford, and thinking, aren’t they Nissan Patrols? There have been many similar instances in the decades since, and as I said at the start, it’s far more common today.

Most recently, the new D27 Nissan Navara is essentially a Mitsubishi Triton; while the MG U9 is almost identical to an LDV Terron 9. And the D-MAX in past guises was sold here as Chevy LUVs, Holden Rodeos and Holden Colorados. Around that same era, Ford brought out the Courier ute, which was a rebadged Mazda B-Series. That sharing went on for years until Ford went its own way and developed the T6-based Ranger – now Australia’s best-selling vehicle – which is also shared with the VW Amarok. 

While some of these shared vehicles seemed logical, given the brands were linked by ownership and partnerships, what about some of the more left-field collaborations?

Like the Mercedes-Benz MB100 van, which was made by a then-young upstart, SsangYong. The deal also saw Mercedes-Benz engines under the bonnets of the first Mussos. Who else remembers Musso owners – and even dealers – fitting the three-pointed star to the quirky-looking wagons at the time?

We never got the model here, but in Europe the Toyota HiLux was rebadged as a VW Taro in the late 1980s, long before the booming popularity of midsize utes or any thoughts of the Amarok.

Back in the 70s Toyota and Daihatsu shared a 4×4 called the Blizzard and Scat respectively, but these days Toyota protects its 4×4 products by largely keeping them to itself. There was also a time when the Big T shared its small and midsize passenger cars with Holden in the ’80s and ’90s in a deal that also gave us the Toyota Lexcen – which, of course, was a Holden Commodore. 

In fact the ’80s and ’90s were prime time for product sharing, and around this time we also started to see wagons based on popular utes. I remember seeing Ford Everest-badged vehicles running around Ford HQ in Melbourne, based on an earlier Mazda platform. We never got that version here but eventually received the Everest on the T6 platform. We did, however, get the Ford Raider – a Courier/B-Series-based wagon. In name only, the Raider badge is back again – this time on a Mitsubishi Triton ute.

There are plenty more examples of product sharing in the automotive world, and I think we’ll see a lot more of it in future, particularly between the Japanese brands as they battle the horde of new arrivals from China.