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Psst, fancy an Evoque lookalike?

Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but it can be a sore point to designers. Simon Hacker cross-examines today’s copycat cars – and asks if originality ever existed

We’re all used to that dismissive snort from anyone beholding the car catwalk’s latest offering: “that’s just a recycled Audi/Mercedes-Benz/Ford under a cheaper badge”. The constraints of international agreements on safety and environmental hurdles make it hard to produce a car that is indisputably original, but all the same, can there be any legitimate excuse for shameless rip-offs?

jeer 2China is by far and away the most-cited culprit, its auto industry being likened to a giant Xerox. Most of the Far East frauds we now guffaw at are aimed at the domestic market. But when you consider the size of the sales pie (around 19 million new cars per year), you’d have to be a dummy of the first order not to accept that a spot of emulation is crucial for any maker seeking a decent helping of the profit. Hence we see BMW’s MINI weirdly morphed into the Lifan 320, the smart fortwo rehashed as the Zotye E30, the Landwind X7 half-heartedly camouflaging itself as a Range Rover Evoque and the Geely GE hoping to seduce all the Lord Sugars out there – or maybe Lord Saccharines? – with a dodgy emulation of the Rolls-Royce Phantom. These cars cost peanuts compared to the cherished originals, so putting aspirational designs within the economic reach of China’s emerging middle class.

3 Western media bursts blood vessels over these ersatz executions, but is this really something new? Rewind the clock to 1893 and Charles Duryea invented the USA’s first combustion engined road vehicle. Or did he? Others argue that arch-enemy Elwood Haynes got there first on a technicality, with his 1894 Pioneer. But originality in automotive creation can be a hollow victory: after all, who remembers these inventors against such names as Henry Ford, a man whose legacy lay far more in business sense than innovation? Being original is no guarantee of fame and fortune.

jeer 4Since those pioneering days, copying has fuelled the car business. And the culture of replication has been positively encouraged by Western brands, ever since Jeep signed a deal with Indian auto brand Mahindra in 1947 to build and badge flat-pack CKD, or complete knock-down, versions of its iconic 4×4 models for the Indian market. Mahindra designed a high level of local content into these cars and the business exercise proved that the best route to profit was through cherry picking existing ideas. In 1957, Hindustan went a step further by buying all the tooling for the Morris Oxford Series III and recreating it as the first Ambassador, a car that went on to become a legend in the nation’s auto history. With this culture for cloning so firmly entrenched, can we really be surprised when Chinese maker JAC brings out an executive car more than vaguely reminiscent of the Audi A6… and calls it the JAC A6?

5 Aside from the obvious easy ride you might have in seeking to sell a car that trades on the allure of an existing model, another good reason is that you are incredibly unlikely to be punished for this shadowy crime. As intellectual property lawyers BRIFFA point out, there is “no international copyright law”, just a network of similar national agreements. Any successful case, experts say, would hinge upon proving that the original design has been indisputably copied, which is a far cry from the simple fact that two cars may look pea-podishly similar. After all, similarity in a court of law can be argued as result of great design minds merely thinking alike.

jeer66 Perhaps the best way to approach imitation designs is to celebrate them as the ultimate tribute to the original. In such obvious cases as Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, which was harking back to the 1934 Airflow, and today’s Beetle and MINI, where the original brands have dug down into their own design vaults to create tribute acts. Their subsequent sales have proved that where there’s a pastiche, there’s a profit. Retro, at a squint, is just a polite word for repro.

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