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Origins
Innocenti's versions of BMC's ADO16 — the Morris/Austin 1100 family, badged IM3 and later J4/J5 — brought Alec Issigonis's hydrolastic-sprung, front-drive masterpiece to Italy from 1963 with distinctly local upgrades: better instruments, brighter trim, detail finishing that Longbridge never quite matched. Italian buyers took to the packaging revolution — a family cabin on a ten-foot-something footprint — and the cars sold strongly enough to make Innocenti one of Italy's significant producers through the sixties. The relationship deepened until British Leyland simply bought the company in 1972, with consequences — the Bertone Mini, the De Tomaso era — that carried the Milan factory far from its licensing origins. The ADO16s remain the partnership's high period: British cleverness, Italian polish, and both sides briefly better for it.
1967 Austin 1100 Heritage Motor Centre, Gaydon · Mark Brown from Hampton, New Brunswick, Canada · CC BY-SA 2.0
