Tadashi WAKASHIMA, a leading Nabokovian in Japan, found out that "an Amilcar" in Ch. 26 of Transparent Things ("The little spitz dog is asleep on the back seat of an Amilcar being driven by the kennelman's wife back to Trux." p. 101) could be a popular French sports car. As Brian Boyd annotates it in the LoA edition, Amilcar was the father of Hannibal (p. 815)--and we can find some allusions to Hannibal in the novel--at the same time, we are seduced to imagine that Nabokov must have seen a photo of "an Amilcar and a lady with her dog" http://www.gazoline.org/Pages/Histoire/amilcar.html sometime before/while working on the novel, though the dog does not look so melancholic: "The lady, when she voyaged herself, generally took with her a small animal, choosing from among those that were most melancholic" (p. 99).

EDNOTE. NABOKV-L thanks Professor Wakashima for this trouvaille and Akiko Nakata for sending it. The well-illustrated web links report that the car(s) first appeared in 1920 and were wide-spread in Germany as well as France. The name, a blend of the names of the company founders, fit in well with other Nabokovian car names such "IKarus," etc.