Dan's post in the Ford Evos thread got me to thinking... what have been some of the best concept-to-production cars? The more extreme the concept and the more unmolested it was on the way to production the better. Bonus points if nobody expected it to actually go into production even in a severely euthanized form. (E.g., even though the Ford GT concept seems like a good candidate, I'd argue it was built to be highly productionable from the get-go, and it was obvious from the GT90 that they desperately wanted to build one.)
As it happens, I'm playing GT Concept at the moment and their ticker expresses amazement that the Toyota MR-S shown in Tokyo in 1999 made it to production almost completely unmolested.
As it happens, I'm playing GT Concept at the moment and their ticker expresses amazement that the Toyota MR-S shown in Tokyo in 1999 made it to production almost completely unmolested.
I remember GT2 said roughly the same thing about the XYR when they made it into the Celica, if I recall correctly.
To this day I am fascinated the Chrysler built the Prowler, and the only change they made to it for production feasibility was redesigning the headlights a bit. Or the Viper, for that matter.
The FT86 will probably join this list eventually. Albeit in another million years time. Although the FT86 II will need a change of nose before it goes into production, unless the FT86 II turns into a more sporty version of the FT86 (or maybe the Subaru version?)
The Porsche 918 Spyder.
Looks pretty much identical to the concept.
The figures they were trying to achieve were sky-high and yet they were able to achieve them. 👍
Although it didn't carry over as well from the design standpoint, the engineering end of the Chevrolet Volt concept faired quite well in a very small amount of time. It took less than a year to get most of the production kinks out, and prototypes were rolling not long after that. Along with the Solstice/Sky, I would guess that the Volt has one of the fastest turnaround times of any concept-to-production vehicles.
Nobody expected the Land Rover LRX concept to go into production virtually unchanged as the Range Rover Evoque. You could even say the seed for the styling had been sown earlier with the Range Stormer. Whilst the Range Rover Sport didn't go into production unchanged, the styling heavily influenced the LRX so we got it eventually...
The EU Fiesta hatch looks more like the Verve than that. Is that a US specific Fiesta? It looks like something went a bit wrong with the conversion from hatch to saloon.
