The two diesels on offer, including a 1.6- and 2.0-liter units, were also popular but hardly what you'd call performance-oriented. But you could also be fancy and get a 1.8- or a 2.0-liter gasoline engine underhood to school the Audi A2s around you. About the size of the Ford Focus of the era, but taller, the Xsara Picasso offered a 1.6-liter inline-four to kick things off, with under 100 hp on tap. This very French mini MPV paired a compact footprint with a very spacious interior that looked vaguely similar from the front and from the back. But thankfully, in 2024 you can import a car that was definitely not painted by Picasso, but could have been were he alive in the 1990s. You may have seen one of Pablo Picasso's paintings, but have you really experienced the man's art if you haven't driven a Picasso? We'd argue that you have not. Finding a running one in great condition and few miles will take some effort, but it will be a small price to pay for having the only Audi A2 in your time zone. not that many examples remain in working condition today, because (surprise!) it's a 25-year old Audi. With concept car looks, the A2 duked it out with other small MPVs of the time, some of them French and some of them wearing Mercedes badges, including the first-gen A-Class and the Vaneo.īut the small A2 was also so far ahead of its time that. The aluminum skin, meanwhile, saved plenty of weight, with the A2 tipping the scales at well under 900 kilos (1984 pounds). The compact mini-MPV offered seating for five and tiny engines, from a 1.2-liter inline-three TDI diesel to a 1.6-liter gasoline inline-four if you wanted "performance" in a small package along with city-friendly dimensions. And in 2024, it's no longer prohibitively expensive, though existing examples might certainly need a clutch replacement by now.īut will it become famous for its appearance in the film, in the same way the DMC-12 did after the Back to the Future films, especially if you can get Travolta or Jackman to autograph it? That's perhaps a taller order, but it's certainly a window into that particular time in pop culture, and also a ticket into British car shows and road tours.Īudi's second aluminum car after the first-gen A8 of 1994, the A2 was a vision of the future that never quite arrived, at least not in any meaningful way outside of European cities. What the Tuscan offered buyers, aside from a requirement to own a soul patch, was 350 hp courtesy of a 4.0-liter inline-six, 0-to-60-mph launches in under four seconds, and the option of a psychedelic paint job. Jackman's performance in the film it looks like an easy-peasy task. We can't argue that the Tuscan is not a unique car in which one can be forced to learn to drive a manual, especially on the fly, and judging by Mr. The TVR Tuscan Speed Six is indeed the car that the soul-patched villain drove while spraying bystanders with gunfire for some reason, and the car in which pre-Wolverine Hugh Jackman had to learn to drive a stick in the span of 20 seconds. Yes, you too can finally look like John Travolta in the very regrettable early 2000s docudrama Swordfish. But once you've found your car for sale, you can give West Coast Shipping a call and they can have the Peugeot 406 of your dreams shipped to your door to re-enact scenes from Ronin. The tough part, of course, is finding a 25-year old car that doesn't have the mileage of an asteroid research spacecraft or a taxi that's been on the road 16 hours a day for the past 25 years, or hasn't been drifted to death through a muddy field in Finland. And most of them are not only fully depreciated, but are either almost free or pretty close to it, because in a lot of countries in Europe (and Japan for that matter) you often have to pay a lot of money to keep old tubs on the road. That's right: Almost every cheap but adorable European or Japanese car from the 1990s you may have seen once on an overseas vacation is now within reach. But even most of those exceptions will float into the 25-year window through the course of this year, finally delivering what some segment of car enthusiasts could only dream about for years, ranging from the slightly embarrassing to the highly coveted. We're almost at the point when it's possible to import just about any car from the blessed 1990s decade, with a few exceptions.
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