Body beautiful

While few car companies have the chutzpa to charge five times the price for a new bodyshell, Lamborghini's not alone in stretching…

While few car companies have the chutzpa to charge five times the price for a new bodyshell, Lamborghini's not alone in stretching the under-body architecture.

Volkswagen has been slapping a variety of bodies onto one architecture to make life cheaper across its smaller cars (Seat, Skoda, VW and Audi) for years.

While Bentley points to its deep engineering on the Continental series, none of them would exist if they hadn't been built on top of the VW Phaeton.

Similarly, the VW Touareg was so over-engineered that it became the most profitable Porsche (the Cayenne and, later, Audi's Q7) in history - so successful that, in the ultimate bite of the hand that feeds you, it gave Porsche the cash to buy VW. Mercedes has done it, too. The CLS is a rebodied E-Class, while the Chrysler Crossfire is a rebodied version of the superseded SLK. It's not just Europe. Before it was bought by Ford, Mazda's 626 had no less than nine alternative body styles, including the MX6, the Probe and Ford's Telstar.