From the people who brought you the Muira, the Alfa Romeo Montreal and the Lancia Stratos comes a Daihatsu Rocky with a BMW engine. Seriously.
In the early 90s, after the Americans had run all the Italian sports car companies out of the country with pitchforks in hand, the well known design firm Bertone needed a new source of income so they focused on the local emerging luxury SUV market. The cash strapped company couldn’t front the budget to develop a whole new car, so instead they decided to find an SUV already in production and remake it the Bertone way. Why reinvent the wheel when you can repackage the wheel with sex appeal? They ultimately decided on the very much unknown Daihatsu Rocky and added their special touches to appeal to the luxury market including leather, power locks, and optional A/C. In order to appeal to Europeans, they couldn’t use the anemic Daihatsu engine to compete with the very popular Jeep Cherokee or Range Rover models so Bertone used the BMW M20 2.0, M20 2.7 and the M21 2.4 Diesel. Overall there were about 2800 of these strange Italian-Japanese-German vehicles making them a rare classic 4x4.
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