[Bill Murray]

Ah David:
Such memories your post brings back. I was ever so fortunate in my days with Volvo to get to travel to, amongst other countries, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey in the 1960's and 1970's and later most of the South American countries in the late 1970's.

Compared to Western Europe, where so many prewar vehicles were destroyed in the war and the Middle East where cars were not heavily imported until well after the war, those countries vehicle parks were a living museum on wheels. Literally thousands of vehicles from the 1920's through the early 1940's were still in daily use. One of my favourites was a 1934 Ford Phaeton used as a daily taxi cab that passed by my office window in Lima, Peru almost daily. Once the war was over, it seems their limited access to foreign exchange prohibited the importation of post war vehicles and the pre war ones just soldiered on and on and on.

Certainly a testament to the standards to which those vehicles were built as compared to the throwaway, disposable vehicles produced from, say, the 1960's.

I cannot speak to other countries strategies, but when I revisited Spain in the mid 1980's, after the death of Franco, I could find almost no cars of any age older than a few years on the road.
My then, Saab, contact there said that the new regime determined Spain would become a producer of cars and trucks and not an importer. They started up a system similar to the British MOT and basically got rid of all of the prewar cars and trucks. The citizens of Spain were then more or less forced to buy new, cheap Spanish produced vehicles.

As a side note to encouraging local production and consumption, Japan had a similar policy at about the same time. This may a little bit of urban legend, but my Japanese contacts of the time said that the 2nd and I believe 3d year MOT virtually guaranteed that it was not cost effective to bring a car or truck up to the standards. As I was told, such mundane things as shock absorbers, fan belts, total lighting systems etc. had to meet new factory specs or had to be replaced. Since this was not cost effective for the owner, they purchased a new vehicle. The used vehicles were apparently disposed of through a system that if not run by the Government was at least supported by it. The end result was a flood of relatively new vehicles that were exported throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America at relatively low prices. Given that the Japanese were already producing some pretty high quality vehicles, that gave them a "beach-head" so to say in establishing their brands in those areas and, well, as they say, the rest is history. Japanese brands dominate in most of those countries to this day.
Almost forgot, I think your ID of a V8-51 is correct.
Bill