Welcome to the series which aims to give our poor old international automotive industry the helping hand it so desperately needs. Witness companies like BMW and Mercedes pumping out ever more broad product portfolios, extending their tentacles into every possible market niche that ever existed, and then inventing extra niches just in case.
To them all: Stop Right Now. Put all your development projects on hiatus until you’ve listened to the word of The Hooniversariat.
Last week we pretty unanimously decided that the world didn’t need an enormous, powerful, high-speed 21st century take on the dayvan, least of all one which looked like something across between a Pontiac GTO and a Renault Avantime. Stands to reason, really. This week we turn the octane up a notch.
Supercars.
It seems they’re everywhere, these days. There are brands, like Ferrari, who can only sell you a supercar, and there are brands like Ford who know only two well of the halo effect that such a vehicle trickles down onto the rest of your output. The driver of even the most humdrum Fiesta can kid himself that the designer of that may have taken water from the same office cooler as the designer of the Ford GT.
Supercars are, generally, good news for image. Image of the brand, image of the customer, unless you’re a high-profile environmentalist, a set of supercar keys dangling from your chain tends to bathe you in positive light.
So I got to wondering, as I took pencil in hand with no real idea what would happen next; what brand could use a supercar that doesn’t yet have one?
The shape we’ve ended up with in the sketch looks European to me, but you’re allowed to disagree. The nose area lends itself to a shield-shaped grille, so Lancia, Alfa? But with a little re-profiling this kind of treatment could be made to suit any number of other identities.
To be honest the drawing doesn’t really mean anything here. It’s just to make the page pretty. But the question still remains valid.
Which name would you like to see sire a new supercar?
(Drawings by Chris Haining, copyright Hooniverse 2015. Yeah, the perspective is out on the wheels but drawing five-hole rims freehand on a Sunday night while watching TV wasn’t going to see me using ellipse templates and mathematics. Fun first, accuracy second)
By RoadworkUK
RoadworkUK is the online persona of Gianni Hirsch, a tall, awkward gentleman with a home office full of gently decomposing paper and a garage full of worthless scrap metal. He lives in the village of Moistly, which is a safe distance from London and is surrounded by enough water and scenery to be interesting. In another life, he has designed, sold, worked on and written about cars in exchange for small quantities of money.
Kamil Kaluski
While I agree that the overall design looks European (possibly because most supercars are designed and built in Europe?), that split grille with a proboscis down the middle bears a striking family resemblance to one US manufacturer. So this car should be built by P O N T I A C !
Oh, wait…
Never Mind.
I made this point yesterday, but I’ll say it again: with that split grill, swoopy lines , wiiide (rear) track (and is there a hint of body cladding on the sides?) this car really should be/have been Pontiac’s first supercar. Except… Not.