Everybody loves a scrappy underdog. But a scrappy underdog on four wheels hits closer to home here. Whether it was a race team with few prospects up against the big manufacturer-backed teams, or an executive down on his luck, stories about unlikely success in the automotive world abound.
The story of Lee Iacocca may be more well-known than that of Jim Hall, but both are nonetheless compelling. Likewise, the Cinderella story of Japanese automakers like Honda and Toyota follows a similar trajectory, with upstarts struggling in the postwar period going on to become the auto giants we know today. Something similar can be said of the Korean OEMs, which now enjoy great popularity in the U.S. despite starting out as bottom-of-the-barrel brands.
If you ask me, history will vindicate the GM EV1 as an unlikely (and, ultimately, doomed) underdog of the EV transition. But it’ll probably be once EVs are the norm and ICE-powered cars are a relic of the past. It’ll still be a while, I suspect.
We asked readers to tell us what or who they believed were the best automotive underdogs of all time, and these were their answers: