Wagons in vintage Street scenes

A little history on this one. I recognized the name 'Little Lake' from my trips up and down US 395 in the Owens Valley of California. Thing was, there were absolutely no buildings that i remembered being in that area - zip, nada, nothing. I can go on the 'street view' of Google Earth, and from the hills in the background of the photo, sort of tell an approximate position, but you can't pinpoint any former building site - even the foundation is all gone.....


Here's some history on it, from one of the family members of the hotel ownership...
http://www.owensvalleyhistory.com/little_lake/page95.html

 

There's a lot of cool pictures on there, any idea what the small car on this one is?

 

OLD ORCHARD BEACH MAINE

 

Wow....... good question.
I'll have to do some digging. Off the top of my head, DKW comes to mind, but I don't know if that's correct. Sure seems to have big wheels for such a tiny car. We've got Newest car that I can spot is the '61 (or newer) Corvette under the 'Cafe' sign.......

I'll see what I can find out....
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Closest match I've found so far is a 1960 Goggomobil T250 - but it's not a perfect match...


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GOT IT!
1955 - 1962 Lloyd 600:


( Built by the Borgward Company in Germany. )

 

I initially guessed it for a Toyota. But, that era Toyota, Datsun, Honda, Mitsubishi and Subaru didn't even come close to having that roof line and wheel well openings. Being it's on the West Coast, Japanese manufacture seemed like the most sensible direction to start solving the riddle. I've seen those taillights before, somewhere. Might be Brit?
Bingo. Note the uncanny resemblance of a later East German 2-cycle cardboard Trabant. There was obviously no such thing as patent- and copyright violations between the Iron Curtain and the rest of the world:



To be fair to this forum:



I was about to use the following quote as a clue to weed out Datsuns from the riddle:

It's too bad, nevertheless, that these 2-cylinder Toyotas weren't to be seen, though. Suspecting that the Ranchero could have been at least a '62 model, I extended my search, only to find this adorable '62:

 

Never seen one of these before! Pretty cool-looking wagon!


Although front-engined, I see some VW Squareback influence in the front end and windshield. Maybe a little 911 Porsche around the headlights, too.

 

When the Japs aren't busy trying to copy Western design, they can be creative, on their own. They have intersting vehicles, for their own market, which were unsuitable for export, either because of safety requirements or because of market projections concluding infeasability. This is one I used to like, when they came out:



Here's one for the markets excluding N. America or, at least, I don't remember seeing these with wrap-around taillights there:





At this pizzeria where I used to deliver, the other delivery guy drove his mom's Datsun 210. I remebered it as not being that reliable. It had the pushrod 1200 engine. But, I somehow liked the style. It had a comfortable ride and was fun to cruise around with, after work