Hatchbacks were always meant to be practical family cars; the idea of crossing one with a sportscar didn’t make sense, until a team of Volkswagen engineers created a hot Golf in their spare time. When the Golf Sport was shown as a project at the 1975 Frankfurt motor show, VW’s management was taken by surprise at the reaction. The hot hatch had been born and it wouldn’t take long for a raft of imitators to arrive.
When BMW introduced the first M5, based on the second-generation 5-Series saloon , few could have seen what the company had unleashed. While those early cars packed all of, what made the M5 so intriguing was the fact that it looked barely more sporty than a 518i – it was the definition of a sleeper.You can’t move now for seven-seat SUVs with three rows of forward-facing seats, but it was the Discovery that introduced us to the concept of a go-anywhere people-carrier.