Mini

Alec Issigonis’s answer to the 1956 Suez fuel crisis: get everything except the passengers and their luggage out of the way, by turning the engine sideways and putting the gearbox in the sump underneath it.^[1] That single layout decision (a transverse engine driving the front wheels, with four-fifths of the car’s floor left for people) became the template every supermini since has copied. The car it produced stayed in production, essentially unaltered underneath, for forty-one years.