page_title: Car platform
section_title: Early examples
hierarchical_section_title: Car platform / Examples / Early examples
caption_attribution_description: 1988.5 Pontiac Sunbird photographed in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
context_page_description: A car platform is a shared set of common design, engineering, and production efforts, as well as major components over a number of outwardly distinct models and even types of cars, often from different, but somewhat related marques. It is practiced in the automotive industry to reduce the costs associated with the development of products by basing those products on a smaller number of platforms. This further allows companies to create distinct models from a design perspective on similar underpinnings.
context_section_description: Originally, a "platform" was a literally shared chassis from a previously-engineered vehicle, as in the case for the Citroën 2CV platform chassis used by the Citroën Ami and Citroën Dyane, and  Volkswagen Beetle frame under the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. But these two manufacturers made vastly different category of vehicles under using the same chassis design at different years though the primary vehicle was still in production.
  In the USA platform sharing has been a common practice since the 1960s, when GM used the same platform in the development of the Pontiac LeMans, the Buick Skylark, the Chevrolet Chevelle, and the Oldsmobile Cutlass.
  In the 1980s, Chrysler's K-cars all wore a badge with the letter "K" to indicate their shared platform. In later stages, the "K" platform was extended in wheelbase, as well as use for several of the Corporation's different models. In the same decade, Fiat and Saab jointly developed cars using the Type Four platform to compete with the German-dominated European executive car segment.
  GM used similar strategies with its "J" platform that debuted in mid-1981 in four of GM's divisions.  Subsequently GM introduced its "A" bodies for the same four divisions using the same tread width/wheelbase of the "X" body platform, but with larger body work to make the cars seem larger, and with larger trunk compartments. They were popular through the 1980s, primarily. Even Cadillac started offering a "J" body model called the Cimarron, a much gussied up version of the other four brands' platform siblings. 
  A similar strategy applied to what is known as the N-J-L platform, arguably the most prolific of GM's efforts on one platform. Once more, GM's four lower level divisions all offered various models on this platform throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.
caption: 1988 Pontiac Sunbird
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