CARS PRODUCED IN LATIN AMERICA

Latin America refers to countries on the American continent where Romance languages derived from Latin are spoken, mostly Spanish or Portuguese. This includes Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, most of Central and South America and many Caribbean islands. When researching the subject with our team of contributors, we discovered hundreds of car makers in Latin America, though most of them were tiny; sometimes only one car built. We can therefore offer here no more than an introduction to Latin American car marques, so we have selected the more important or more interesting stories. When imports or locally-assembled cars were expensive or non-existent, locally-designed cars were made in small numbers. Then a period of licensing the assembly of foreign products produced unusual variations on well-known cars. Eventually, however, most Latin American car factories were subsidiaries of major international concerns, their products similar to those made by the parent companies, but we have tried in this publication to describe some of the cars which were unique to Latin America, as well as other ‘personal vehicles’ such as pickups. The stories of ‘world cars’ as built in Latin America, and identical to those made elsewhere, have already been told in other Auto Review books devoted to specific marques, so they don’t need to be detailed here.