Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Suffolk Cars

Just to make it clear, I have no association with Tata/JLR (apart from once owning an X300, and once spending an evening sight-seeing at the top of the Tata Tower in Calcutta )
This whole thing has just got my back up and smacks of the Daily Mail 'my kid got sent home from school for wearing the wrong uniform after 500 warnings for wearing the wrong uniform'......

The car manufacturing world is a very strange one, when just simple things like the Porsche 901 became the 911 because Peugeot objected to Porsche using any three digit number where the middle number was 0, asserting ownership of the naming rights in key markets, and having already sold many models with that scheme. We can try and rationalise what real benefit Peugeot gained till the cows come home but at some point they would reach the end of the range X09 (eg 209, 309) ...

Actually, Peugeot has already had a 309 in the late 80s - the rebadged Talbot built at Ryton. Peugeot stopped the numerical progression in 2013 so all models are now X08s.

Did Peugeot ever object to Ferrari's use of 308?

The story goes that Porsche presented its new 901 at the IAA Frankfurt motor show in September 1963 as the successor to its inaugural 356 model range. Series production of the 901 began in September 1964, but when Porsche presented the model at the Paris Motor Show in October of that year, French car manufacturer Peugeot objected to the new Porsche’s 901 model designation. The reason? Way back in 1929, Peugeot had globally patented a three-digit model designation code with a ‘zero’ in the middle (e.g. 104, 206, 308, etc.). Porsche was therefore compelled to expensively rename its 901 as the 911, with just 82 examples of the 901 produced before the enforced name change. As an interesting aside however, Peugeot didn’t object to the Bristol (e.g. 401, 402, 406, etc.) and Ferrari (208, 308) marques using its patented three-digit model designation system, with Bristol even sourcing the model badges for its 403 directly from Peugeot!

Blatant facsimiles and design copyright infringements are another common cause of car company ‘punch-ups’ too. German manufacturers Smart and BMW have been successful at preventing shameless Chinese-made copies of some their models from being exhibited and sold in certain European markets, with the latter also preventing the small-scale British bespoke production of an appealing 1960s Stewart & Arden lowered Mini Sprint replica, due to BMW registering the shape of the classic 1959-2000 Mini.

Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar and Ferrari have also managed to put a stop to various replicas from their comprehensive back catalogues of iconic models being made, with some fake body panels and moulds even being crushed by law! Recently though, Italian coachbuilder ARES Design has played Ferrari at its own game, winning a legal battle in the Brussels EU courts on a copyright ruling, enabling ARES to make Ferrari 250 GTO-inspired models.

Specialist British sports car maker Caterham has arguably been the most effective at stopping direct copies (of its archetypal Seven model) being reproduced, however. The Seven’s originator, Lotus founder Colin Chapman, agreed to pass the production rights to his inspired, simple two-seater roadster over to Caterham (previously the world’s top-selling Seven dealer specialist) in 1972.

Of the many hundreds of Lotus Seven-inspired cars made around the world since then, Caterham managed to quash would-be English rival Chris Smith produce his early Westfield facsimiles in the mid-1980s, forcing a design change to these more affordable Sevens, with all of the tooling for the early models (which subsequently became known as the pre-lit [litigation] Westfields) being destroyed by court order.

Caterham’s Dutch agent/importer – Donkervoort – was similarly forced to stop building its own precise replicas of the Chapman Seven too, with increasingly extreme reinterpretations of the Lotus original being developed and sold as the S8 and S10 models over the last 45-years or so, thus avoiding the need for expensive lawyers and playground-style scraps.