2. Toyota Crown
Toyota’s longest surviving model name, the Crown, has always been used for the Japanese brand’s most prestigious traditional saloon models since the late 1950s, often festooned with a crown logo on the car and embossed into its head restraints.
The Crown was the first Toyota model to be exported to many overseas markets, including Australia and the USA, where initially the car bombed as it was not engineered to suit demanding American roads or its consumer. The initial Crown models quickly withdrawn from the local US market, only to return again (somewhat more triumphal) a few years later once Toyota’s engineers had learned the need to develop its models specifically to suit its export market needs. By the time the Crown was first offered in the UK in the late 1960s, the range-topping six-cylinder model was in its third generation.
The car proved to be a slow but steady seller over here, failing to make much a dent in the sales of home-grown prestige executive rivals such as the Rover 2000, Triumph 2000, Ford Zodiac and Vauxhall Cresta. A more successful and distinctive Mark IV Crown debuted in Britain in 1971 in three body configurations, all of which were replaced by the more sedate and dated Mark V in 1974. This formal but dull square-cut Crown itself was superseded in 1979 by an even more old fashioned and boxy model 2.8-litre Mark VI, this being dropped from the UK and most European and American export markets in 1983.
Since then, the Crown has remained a very strong seller in its home Japanese market, with the latest incarnations now offered in modern cross-over form, as well as the more traditional sedan format that has typified the prestigious Toyota Crown model for almost 70 years.