SAAB, great looking cars with futuristic features!

Pontiac

The Swedish Volvo and not the chinese Volvo. I feel like we would have had a power house for electric vhicles with Volvo. Now we are stuck with the French cars. Renault is doing really great. But isn't Volvo. I feel like Saab would had gone Volkswagen as well, and come too late for the party and die out anyways. But they made good cars as well.

Holden and Ford Australia. Partly for personal nostalgic reasons but also because of local engineering and manufacturing. A bit of our national identity disappeared when they shut down, although they were owned by US companies they were still a source of Aussie pride. Nowadays we have no local industry and it all just feels a bit hollow. Like watching sports when you have no local team.

I doubt they'd be able to make them these days but seeing as we're talking hypotheticals, there's something about a big cube V8 or turbo 6 that’s missing from everything since. Yes I know on here the hive mind demands we boo ands hiss if someone dares to like anything ICE, and when our current runabout goes it'll likely be replaced by an EV of some sort. But for us, cars are a hobby and a source of enjoyment too, and I dare say we'll have at least one ICE vehicle for a long as it's feasible for us to do so. And if I can get a semi-modern nod to the past that would be perfect.

And if the Japanese car industry could go back to the 90s I'd be pretty stoked about that too!

I had a Saturn which was a really nice car except for all that stuff under the hood.

Maybe have an EV company buy the branding from it.

I’d bring back Reliant to make an electric version of the three wheel Robin purely for meme purposes.

Duesenberg. They made incredibly stylish and well engineered cars that were ahead of their time. I'd love to see a true competitor to Rolls Royce (Bentley doesn't really compete with Rolls anymore. Sure they're expensive luxury cars, but they aren't anywhere near as bespoke as Rolls Royce cars are).

Someone already said SAAB so Mitsubishi

RIP Lancer Evo

Delorean Motor Company.

I'd love to see a modern take on the classic Delorean. Something that isn't a fugly ass cybertruck dorkmobile.

Studebaker so we can bring back the jet engine nose style.

tram.

Volkswagen. Pre-2000s Volkswagen. In the 90s and earlier, their aircooled and watercooled cars were amazing junkyard tuners, that just wouldn't die.

I'm honestly kind of surprised Ford hasn't re-released the Mercury or rebranded some cars as Mercury brand.

They weren't good cars, but they had songs and brand appeal. And who knows, maybe somebody would think well of them.

De Tomaso

Auburn

Wrangle out of the clutching, greedy hands of marketing departements the names "Abarth" and "Cooper", then give them to actual performance workshops working on bettering affordable cars.

British Leyland. Specifically so we can have a boogieman.

Geo.

My Dad had a Geo Metro 5-speed that was getting 49 MPG in the 90's. Bought it brand new for like 10k. Sure it was a 3 cylinder that went 0-60 in ... eventually, but it'd be nice to be able to get that kind of mileage without paying out the nose for a hybrid.

International Harvester.

My dad had a Scout before I was born. I knew a guy with an international pickup truck that was indestructible.

I know the scout is coming back as an EV. But it seems to be a VW offshoot. So not really excited about that.

Wiesmann, or any other small-scale German sports car manufacturer for that matter. It seems like all sports car brands are owned by big conglomerates nowadays, and nearly all of them are pretty boring and generic as a result.

I know that Wiesmann is still around but they're nothing but a shell of what they once were.

Shoutouts to Roland Gumpert.

I wish Ford had more regular cars in North America, they got rid of all except the Mustang

DAF

they still make trucks, but their "regular" where one of a kind with it's variomatic

Tucker! They never really got their footing but had some really innovative features that took decades for the industry to fully adopt. I’d be interested to see what they would be producing if they were around today.

I feel like amc was pretty innovative for its time. Most brands I can think of would probably succumb to the blob crossover trend because of how the us markets are set up for cars, but I feel like amc could still put an interesting twist on things.

Spyker.

Austin, always had a soft spot for them & my grandmother learnt to drive in one.

Gilbern, great lightweight fibreglass bodied "sports" cars from Wales...

Mercury, Saturn, Pontiac, Plymouth, Mitsubishi. Plenty more, but those are off the top of my head.

Fun fact: GM will buy out a company, and to no surprise, it gets ruined. 😂

Saturn because they were starting to go back on the upswing when GM killed them off and they didn't deserve their fate.

I mean, the Sky was actually kinda sick as a cheap sports car. Now imagine if Saturn had borrowed the 2.8t LP9 V6 from Saab to stick in a hotter trim of that car, and modified the Kappa chassis to take a torque tube and remote transaxle layout similar to what the 'Vette used at the time.

Zaporozhec' (I have one lol)

I feel like the answer is different if I am just resurrecting them as they were when they died, vs if I am magically in charge of the brand with funding to start "fresh"....