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All industries have "not many people know that" facts and the world of cars is no different.
As we come to terms with the world as we find it today, we suggest taking a diversion. Join us for a journey into a bunch of odd, surprising and downright weird facts about the car world. You'll hopefully feel right at home, right now:
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Vive La France
Although the car was invented by German Karl Benz, it wasn't the Germans who dominated car production in the earliest days of motoring. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was the Americans – but it wasn't them either, nor the Brits. Until 1906 it was the French who made more cars than any other nation. America took over in 1907.
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Volvo’s false start
Volvo built its first car in 1927. Known unofficially as the Jakob and officially as the OV4, the first example of this large four-seater tourer was driven out of the company's workshop on 14 April and promptly back in again – because the rear axle had been assembled incorrectly, resulting in the car having four reverse gears and just one to move the car forwards.
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Model T rules the world
In 2020, car buyers have never had such a bewildering number of makes and models to choose between – or such an array of powertrains either. But things were simpler a century ago with the Henry Ford’s Model T (pictured) dominating new car sales around the globe. In fact the car was so popular that it's reckoned half of the cars on the world’s roads in 1920 were Ford Model Ts.
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Mighty Michigan
Talking of Model Ts… most Model Ts back then came from Michigan. Great Britain today has around 35 million cars on its roads. Back in 1920, the state of Michigan alone had more cars in it than the whole of Great Britain, then including Ireland. In 1923, sparsely populated Kansas had more cars than France or Germany. Yes, America - with its distances - took to the car like nowhere else. By 1927, America was building 85% of the world’s cars. PICTURE: central Detroit in the 1920s
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Record breaker
Autocar is the world's oldest car magazine, launched in November 1895 as The Autocar. Just two years later our first editor, Henry Sturmey (pictured), was the first man to drive across Britain, from Land's End in the far west of England to John O'Groats, in the far north-east of Scotland. The 874-mile journey took 10 days and he did it at an average speed of 10mph (driving time) in a Daimler 4 ½ HP.
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Titanic’s car
When the Titanic sank in 1912 it had a solitary car in its hold – a brand new Renault Type CB Coupé de Ville. The car was bought by William Carter of Pennsylvania, while he was touring Europe with his wife and two children. The Renault was then loaded on to the Titanic when the Carters returned home – only to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic, never to be seen again. And yes, it’s the car you see play an, ahem, important role in the blockbusting 1997 movie. The Carters happily all survived the sinking. Auctioneers RM Sothebys sold an example for $270,000 in 2008 (pictured).
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Mass prediction
Ford is often credited with inventing the moving production line. But the Curved Dash Oldsmobile (pictured) was the world's first mass-produced car, introduced in 1901 – the Model T didn't appear until 1908. Despite this, Henry Ford took his inspiration from the clockmaking and armaments industries, with his production line cutting manufacturing times from 12.5 hours to just 1.5 hours. Incidentally, the reason why his Model T came only in black for a while, was that it was the only colour that dried fast enough to keep up with the rate of production.
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Electric first
The first land speed record was broken in December 1898 – by an electric car named Jeantaud Duc (pictured), travelling at 39.24mph. The next five records were all broken by electric cars, which raised the bar to 65.79mph. The seventh record was broken by a steam car (75.06mph) – it wasn't until the eighth record that a car powered by an internal combustion engine reigned supreme. That was in 1902, when William K Vanderbilt drove his Mors to 76.03mph.
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1066 and all that
When Daimler launched its new small saloon in 1953 it was called the Conquest. That's because the car was priced at £1066 before taxes – and the Norman Conquest took place in 1066. 4568 Conquest saloons were produced by the time production ended in 1958.
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Samsung’s cars
Yes, that Korean company that makes your phone and your TV briefly also made cars. It started in 1994 but was clobbered by the Asian financial crisis of 1998. It sold the company to Renault in 2000.
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Ford’s robots
It’s believed that in the 1950s at a Ford engine factory in Cleveland, Ohio, a Ford executive proudly showed off some of the firm’s first robots to the United Auto Workers union boss Walter Reuther (1907-1970).
He quipped “Walter, how are you going to collect union dues from these guys?” Reuther shot back: “How are you going to get these guys to buy your cars?”
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Hitler’s cars
After Adolf Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, the fuel tanks of his now redundant motor pool were drained to obtain the fuel to burn his body. A huge fan of cars, he never learned how to drive.
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First electric cars
No, the first electric cars were not Teslas, milk floats or dodgems. The first one appeared in 1884, invented by the Briton Thomas Parker (1843-1915), a year before the first car equipped with an internal combustion engine (ICE) from Karl Benz. Electric power was very popular in the motor car’s early days - especially as they didn’t require cranking to start - and only gave way to the ICE as the latter became much better and more practical.
And electric starters arrived to solve the cranking problem, pioneered by Cadillac in 1912.
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Lamborghini’s tractors
Lamborghini is famous today for making some of the world’s fastest and most glamorous supercars. But it started out making tractors – and the original firm still does; the sports car side is today owned by Audi. Lamborghini’s biggest and baddest tractor today until recently was called the R8 (pictured), a name it shares with the fastest Audi.
Porsche also produced tractors for a period in the ‘50s and early ‘60s.
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Opel’s shark attack
Peer around the cabin on an Opel/Vauxhall Corsa, Insignia, Zafira Tourer, Adam or Astra hard enough and you’ll find a moulded shark on one of the surfaces, usually around the glovebox area or under the cupholders. Nobody can fully explain why, but rumours persist that its presence was originally down to a late-night bet among designers as to whether they could sneak it through to production.
The legend was born - and it became a feature of every new Opel/Vauxhall, though sadly not it seems any of its sister cars from Buick in America. Opel was previously owned by GM, but we’re pleased to report the tradition continues under Opel’s new French owners, PSA.
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Fordlandia
In 1928 Henry Ford built a town by a river in Brazil in order to secure supplies of rubber for his cars built in America. Strict rules in accordance with Ford’s beliefs governed the townspeople’s behaviour, including a ban on alcohol, tobacco and even women, and they were fed American food which they didn’t like very much.
After growing frictions, the town was relocated in 1934, and both towns were sold back to the Brazilian government in 1945. Ford wasted $208 million in modern money on the project – and Henry Ford never visited either town.
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Jaguar & SS Cars
Jaguar was until the Second World War known as SS Cars - SS standing for Swallow Sidecar. Given the notoriety the Nazi SS organisation gained during the war - and the company’s badge (pictured inset) hardly helped matters - in March 1945 the firm sensibly renamed itself to a model name, Jaguar, as the Nazis and the SS were approaching a warmly welcomed demise. This is a SS Jaguar from the late 1930s.
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Mercedes-Benz
Ever wondered why the first half of this most German of companies has a Hispanic female name? In the late-19th century, Emil Jellinek (1853-1918) would buy Daimler vehicles and modify them for racing, and gave his cars the moniker Mercedes, named after his apparently beautiful daughter, Mercédès (pictured), who was born to his Franco-Algerian wife Rachel Goggmann Cenrobert. Daimler liked the changes so much they launched its first Mercedes-branded car in 1900.
Daimler and Benz merged in 1926, creating Daimler-Benz, whose vehicles would thereafter be named Mercedes-Benz. Mercédès herself sadly died of cancer in 1929, aged just 39 - and didn’t apparently share her father’s love for cars.
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Renault’s topless American dream
Renault tried cozying up to convertible-hungry American buyers by chopping the roof off the 9, christened Alliance on the other side of the pond. It was brilliant on paper, but motorists quickly decided getting a tan on the motorway wasn’t worth putting up with the intimidating quality issues that plagued Renault’s Wisconsin-built cars.
The addition of a high-performance, GTA-badged model for the 1987 model year did little to boost sales. Production ended when Renault left North America in 1988, its interests there sold to Chrysler.
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The only metric everyone agrees on
The motor industry is plagued with different metrics to measure the same thing, usage dependent on the country. For example, Power has at least four measurements: horsepower, brake horsepower, and PS (Pferdestärke), which are very similar but none exactly the same as another. In 1992, the EU deemed a new power standard, kilowatts. Gallons are not the same; the US uses gallons that are 17% smaller than the gallons used in Britain, and much of the rest of the world uses litres, the metric standard.
The only automotive metric that is standard? Wheel sizes. Yes, even places like Europe which abandoned non-metric measurements decades or indeed centuries ago still use inches. Getting the correct tyres are vitally important to car safety, and we can all be glad that, for once, everyone decided on something, and have stuck to it.
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Lightweight Porsche
Porsche was so obsessed with saving weight from its first purpose-built lightweight 911 - the original 911R of 1967. For the 911R they made the badge a sticker, removed the wheel centre caps and cast the door hinges out of aluminium. The result weighed 814kg, less than half what a standard 911 Turbo weighs today.
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Peugeot created the Porsche 911
Well, not quite but hear us out. Porsche’s replacement for the 356 was to be called 901. However, Peugeot protested, saying that only it could launch cars with three-digit names with zero in the middle, so it was changed to the number that would become a legend: 911.
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The energy polarizer
GM’s Australian division Holden had a performance arm called the Holden Dealer Team (HDT) run by enigmatic race car driver Peter Brock (1945-2006). In 1986 Brock began to install a gadget dubbed the "Energy Polariser" into HDT vehicles. The machine contained crystals and magnets in an epoxy resin that, he claimed, improved the performance and handling of vehicles through "aligning the molecules".
GM was not impressed by this theory and total lack of any evidence-based benefits, and dropped its association with Brock. It set up Holden Special Vehicles instead, in conjunction with Scottish businessman Tom Walkinshaw. Brock died in an accident in 2006 during a rally, aged 61, and this is his memorial.
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The origins of Alfa Romeo
How did Alfa Romeo get its name? Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili (the Lombardy Car Manufacturing Company) was set up in 1910 and taken over by industrialist Nicola Romeo (1876-1938) in 1915. He merged his name with ALFA and we get ALFA Romeo - one part is an acronym and the other isn’t…
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A road-going dodgem
The Rytecraft Scootacar that was introduced in 1938 was a road-ready version of a fairground dodgem. Rytecraft fitted a 98cc single-cylinder engine that took the car all the way up to a heady 15mph. Despite its tiny size and sloth-like performance, Jim Parkinson drove one round the world on a 421-day 15,000-mile odyssey - as chronicled here by Motor magazine, an Autocar predecessor title.
He didn’t even take one of the later models that packed a 250cc engine and was good for a probably frightening 40mph.
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Ford aerospace
Ford started making planes in 1925, and 199 of its three-engined 4-AT-E Trimotor airliner were built up to 1933 (pictured). It was briefly the world’s largest maker of commercial aircraft, and at the same time Ford began the world's first regularly scheduled commercial cargo airline. Henry Ford gradually lost interest after his personal pilot was killed in a crash flying a Ford Flivver prototype monoplane in 1928, and then his company was buffeted by the great depression.
During World War Two Ford produced the B-24 Liberator bomber under licence at its factory at Willow Run, Michigan. In the 1950s, a new Ford division built Sidewinder air-to-air missiles for the US Air Force, before Ford sold the business in 1990.
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Messerschmitt’s cars
After producing thousands of aircraft for Nazi Germany during the Second World War, the firm was forbidden to make any more after it ended for a period of ten years. It turned its hand to bubble car production instead, and the designs were clearly distant relatives of the firm’s warplanes.
The microcar market was eventually decimated by slightly larger cheap cars like the Mini, and Messerschmitt was allowed back into the aerospace game.
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Twenty’s plenty
In 1905 Rolls-Royce introduced a V8-powered car that was limited to just 20mph. That’s because at the time, the maximum speed allowed in the UK was just 20mph, so Rolls-Royce created a car that would keep its driver within the law. Called the Legalimit, just one example of the 3,535cc machine was sold. It was scrapped when Rolls-Royce bought the car back from its owner and as a result none of these cars survive.
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See the light
The 1966 Jensen Interceptor holds the honour of being the first car ever to be fitted with a courtesy delay for its interior light, so it stayed on after the door was closed to aid entry to the driver’s home.
The 2001 Lexus SC430 was the first car to feature an illuminated sill plate, with the word ‘Lexus’ lighting up at night when the door was opened.
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Tesla’s Easter Eggs
Teslas have a long stream of so-called Easter Eggs in the car’s touchscreen infotainment system. If you own a Model S, enter the service access menu, and type ‘007’ into the keyboard; the vehicle controls menu will change the graphic of your Tesla into the Lotus Esprit submarine from the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, which Musk now owns.
Changing the ‘depth’ will instead adjust the ride height of the car. You can also change the map of the world into one of Mars, a place Musk hopes to visit one day, and also use the touchscreen as a sketch pad or invoke commentary from the film Spaceballs. Classic Atari video games have also been added to Tesla’s system – to be played when stationary, thank you.
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Autocar road tests the Top Gear electric car
Back in 2009 Top Gear’s Hammond, Clarkson and May were set yet another challenge. This time, they were to invent a new electric car, and as the dynamic trio went into the workshop to conjure up their finest ideas, the Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust was born.
Part shed, part car, the i-Thrust was presented to the televisual public, its appearance on Top Gear concluding with perhaps the toughest test of all - a full road test by the world’s oldest car magazine. Yes, Autocar. Our verdict? "It's impossible to regard the i-Thrust as a success."
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BMW’s British brand-fest
When BMW extricated itself from its Rover debacle, it did more than just keep Mini as it strolled out of the door. To this day, BMW owns the Riley and Triumph brands - the latter for cars only. In terms of model names, it also still owns Clubman, Countryman, Dolomite, Kestrel, Knightsbridge, Maxi, Metro, Spitfire, Stag, Steptronic, and TR4, the first two being used on current Mini models. This is a Triumph Stag from 1976. Dear BMW, please make a new one, Love from Autocar.
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Ford owned Rover?
Well, sort of. When Ford bought Land Rover from BMW, an extremely diligent lawyer for Ford negotiated a contract clause that stipulated that, should MG Rover ever cease trading, Ford would be able to buy the brand name, and from BMW, not MG Rover which never formally owned it. It did so in 2006 for, it is said, around £10 million. When Ford in turn sold Land Rover, with Jaguar, to India’s Tata Motors in 2008, the Rover brand went with it.
Had all this not happened, today you could have had the potential chaos of Rover-branded cars - and SUVs - being produced, probably by a Chinese company; China’s SAIC and Nanjing (which later merged with SAIC) bought much of the wreckage of MG Rover, including the Rover 75, MG, and old brands like Austin.
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Nicked by a rally driver
The ubiquitous Gatso speed camera is used today to penalise speeding drivers, but its inventor had a very different purpose in mind for his creation. Dutch rally driver Maurice “Maus” Gatsonides (1911-1998) developed the device to measure his cornering speeds in an effort to make himself a faster driver.
Speaking about his invention, Gatsonides once said, ‘I am often caught by my own speed cameras and find hefty fines on my doormat. Even I can't escape my own invention because I love speeding.’
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Toy rubber
The world’s most prolific tyre maker - in terms of number of tyres made per year - is not Michelin, Pirelli or Continental, but Lego.
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Rover donors for exotic cars
The Pagani Zonda’s climate control unit is based on that fitted to the Rover 45. It has the same digital display and buttons, and the unit’s parts are interchangeable.
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Volvo’s first concept car
Volvo arguably introduced the industry’s first concept car when it unveiled the Venus Bilo in 1933. It tested the public’s reaction to a more aerodynamic design with a full-width body, a curved grille and headlights mounted almost flush with the body.
After embarking on a tour of Sweden, the Venus Bilo was purchased by the owner of a scrapyard in Denmark and converted into a pickup. It hasn’t been seen since the 1950s; most historians agree it was scrapped.
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V8-powered Citroën
Citroën planned a V8-powered Traction Avant named 22CV. The engine wasn’t ready in time for its scheduled debut at the 1934 Paris Auto Show, so the three examples displayed in the French capital used a Ford V8. Michelin put an end to the project when it took over Citroën in 1934, and the test cars were destroyed.
One survived: in 1948, a dealership in Chartres, France, received a mysterious telegram from Vietnam - then a French colony - asking for the parts required to rebuild a 22CV water pump. The parts were not available, and noone has heard of the car since.
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The Wolseley
The Wolseley restaurant near Piccadilly Circus in London is today one of the city’s most famous and celebrated places for classy dining. But it’s named after a Wolseley car dealership that occupied the site until 1926.
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Puttering Along
The VW Golf Mk 1 was made in South Africa until 2009. Volkswagen South Africa manufactured the Mk1 Golf from 1978, and when the bigger, more expensive Mk2 arrived in 1984, it decided to continue production of the more affordable original alongside the new Mk2. Known as the Citi Golf, the Mk1 enjoyed a 25 year production life in South Africa, receiving many modifications on the way.
There were styling tweaks too, including a new grille, deeper bumpers and a distinctive crease in the ‘D’ pillar in 1988, and in 2004 a new dashboard borrowed from the Skoda Fabia. The Citi Golf was replaced in 2010 by a version of the Mk4 Polo, called Polo Vivo.
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A Minor matter
Alec Issigonis designed the Morris Minor, which made its debut in 1948. Codenamed Mosquito, Issigonis wanted the new family saloon to feature a flat-four engine and front-wheel drive but that was too radical for company boss Lord Nuffield, who likened the car to a poached egg.
When Issigonis showed him the finished prototype less than a year before the car was supposed to make its debut, Nuffield insisted that the car be widened by four inches, so the car was cut down the middle and a strip was inserted - which is why the bonnet has a four-inch strip down its centre.
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Rotary club
If there’s some weird tech doing the rounds, you can bet that Citroën will have (or want) a hand in it. So when the rotary engine was new and exciting back in the late 1960s the French car maker embraced it wholeheartedly, going so far as to set up a joint venture with NSU, called Comotor. First came the M35 in 1969. Derived from the Ami 8, just 267 were built and most were bought back to be scrapped.
Despite the lack of success with the M35, the GS Birotor (above) appeared in 1973 - it was priced the same as the larger DS, but had worse fuel economy. This proved to be perfect timing for the 1973 oil crisis, when pump prices soared overnight. This time 847 were made, but once again Citroën tried to buy them back to crush them, so it wouldn’t have to produce spares. A few have survived however.
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21st century Jeep woody
Jeep tried resurrecting faux wood paneling by offering it as a dealer-installed option on the first-generation Liberty, which was known as the Cherokee outside of North America. The Wagoneer Package included panels on the front wings, the doors and the rear quarter panel, plus Wagoneer emblems on both sides. The option wasn’t nearly as popular as Jeep hoped, and it decided to send the nameplate -- along with fake wood trim -- to the pantheon of automotive history once and for all.
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Straight-six Saab
In 1959, Saab engineers on a mission to create the ultimate rally car developed a two-stroke straight-six engine by fusing together two three-cylinder engines. The transversal six had a displacement of about 1.5 litres, and it channeled 138hp to the front wheels through a three-speed manual transmission.
The prototype (named Monstret, Swedish for “monster”) had a bright future until its masterminds realised such an oddball creation would be banned from most racing series.
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Road safety
Think driving at night and in bad weather conditions is the most dangerous type of driving? Think again. As writer Tom Vanderbilt says in his 2008 book Traffic “There is a simple mantra you can carry about you in traffic: When a situation feels dangerous to you, it's probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard. Most crashes… happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers.” As the late comedian Bill Hicks once observed in another context, non-smokers die every day.
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Speed kills?
Many people believe that speed and road deaths are closely correlated. On that basis Germany - many of whose major autobahns have no speed limits at all for long stretches - would have the most dangerous roads in the world.
Not so. In terms of vehicle deaths-per-1-billion-kilometres travelled on motorway/highway/autobahn data from 2016, Germany has 4.2, less than neighbours France (5.8) and Belgium (7.8). The figure for the United States is also 7.8.
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Jaguar’s Daimler
Germany’s Daimler is the parent company of Mercedes-Benz and as such is one of the world’s largest car companies. So it produces Daimler-branded cars too? Well, no; that right in fact belongs to Jaguar Land Rover, one of Mercedes’ largest rivals, and British to boot. Jaguar owns the brand name after a predecessor company bought it in 1895.
In 2007 Jaguar agreed that Daimler could use the name as a trading company, a trade name or a corporate name, but Jaguar retains the right to make Daimler-branded cars, something that it has not done since 2007; Jaguar lost the right to use the trademark in the US in 2009 for legal reasons.
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