Design Study

These two designs, rendered by Jingxu Zhan, are examples of what the future could look like for General Motors’ performance car lineup. Considering the nature of these futuristic designs and the two most recognizable performance cars under the GM umbrella, it’s entirely possible that Jingxu Zhan could be giving all of us a sneak peek of the future Chevrolet Corvette and Chevrolet Camaro. Raise your hands if you’re intrigued.

Released in December 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 is still the game of the hour in January 2021. And while it’s not the most appealing video game to car enthusiasts, Cyberpunk 2077 is packed with vehicles that range from hypercars to heavy-duty haulers. They’re obviously fictional, but some of them are clearly inspired by real-life vehicles. A Behance artist felt that Cyberpunk 2077 could use a bit of Ferrari in its life and designed the FerRAR.EXE.

Bringing back dead car monikers is way easier today than it was not so many years ago. You’ve got a lot of internet-based pixel manipulators with a knack for cars and more often than not, the results are drool-worthy. Sometimes, however, they’re just downright eccentric and polarizing.

There isn’t a shortage of means to customize your Toyota Supra. The variety of widebody kits and performance tune-ups can please even the most demanding customer but it’s most often than not a rad design study that fully captures our attention.

Now, while 911s turned into off-road trailblazers are quite a common sight these days, safari-style Supras are still to be invented. This design study might make a good starting point, actually.

Ford unleashed the new Bronco in all its glory earlier this year. It sure put the Jeep Wrangler on red alert, but other than that, it doesn’t really have any other competitor. Rendering artist Ryan Schlotthauer, however, has imagined the Boulder, a baby Hummer of sorts that has the potential to take on the Bronco and the Wrangler head-on. GM, can you just hire him already?

Let’s face it: the Taycan is an amazing sports car, nothing short of what we expected from Porsche in the first place. And when I say amazing I say capable of breaking one’s neck during full acceleration from a standstill but also capable of planting itself on the road like it’s on rails.

Then again, what if the Taycan belonged to the supercar species?

The Lamborghini Murcielago may have been discontinued back in 2010, but it’s still being included on lists about the greatest supercars ever built. Yes, it’s not as powerful and fast as its successor, the Aventador, but it’s ageing nicely and it still has what it takes to give modern supercars a run for their money. This widebody rendering by Jonsibal is proof that the Murcielago hasn’t been forgotten and a reminder that this Lambo looks incredible in a racing suit.

Ferrari introduced the 812 Superfast in 2017, but its front-engined grand tourer is actually much older than that. Essentially a facelifted version of the F12berlinetta, the design and underpinnings of the current V-12 grand tourer go back to 2012. This makes it eight years old as of 2020, two years more than its predecessor, the 599. In short, it’s time for a full redesign, but it seems Ferrari is not in a hurry to deliver one. But the CascoRosso, a futuristic rendering of a front-engined Ferrari grand tourer, seems like the perfect replacement.

Cyberpunk 2077 is all the rave right now and with load of cars to discover (aka buy, earn, or steal) and drive in the game, it looks like the gaming community is going to have a blast during the incoming holiday season.

Fun aside, one of our favorite pixel manipulators brought back an old design of his and while the car isn’t in the game, we urge the devs to make it available via a future DLC.

It’s well established that I count the first-generation BMW 8 Series as one of my grail cars. It still ranks as one of the most beautiful cars I’ve ever seen, and two decades after BMW ended production of the E31 8 Series, I’m still smitten by it every time I see it. This, then, leads me to the Instagram page of Khyzyl Saleem, a rendering artist who has earned followers for his incredible creations. Saleem recently rendered a BMW 850CSi in what he described as his “perfect spec,” and the results are, well, intriguing, to say the least.

When it comes to aftermarket-modified Toyota Supras (I’m obviously talking about the fourth-generation A80 model), you won’t find a more extreme aero kit than Abflug’s S900. In typical Abflug fashion, the S900 turns the Supra MkIV into an aggressive-looking monster that you definitely don’t want to see in your rear-view mirror. But what happens when you use the S900 kit on a Dodge Viper? Well, things become even hotter.

Try to predict what mobility will look like in the next 15 or 20 years judging by the current prototypes from a couple of companies and if your imagination allows it, you’ll be looking at a very diverse environment.

I mean, Uber wants to take ride sharing to the skies, flying car startups are slowly making headway, and pretty much every carmaker out there has some sort of self-driving prototype in mind. And most often than not, these contraptions are designed like mobile living rooms or work spaces on wheels. Another thing in common is their promise to cut down on dead time since they ditch the human driver in the first place.

We know we’ve been bombarding you with a lot of Subaru BRZ-related content lately especially of the how-would-it-look-in-STI-clothes variety, so let’s switch it up a little, shall we?

Just check out this 1994 Ford Mustang Cosworth digital unicorn that Abimelec Arellano created and somehow managed to flawlessly piece together. I mean, come on, this looks like it’s fresh out of an unpublished, secret book of Blue Oval concepts that never made it into production.

We feel forced to interrupt our usual schedule for an absolute gem of a post uploaded on Instagram by Maserati Fuoriserie, the Italian carmaker’s arm that handles the sort of personalization that usually ends up in one-of-a-kind cars for supposedly very happy and proud customers.

In the said post, Maserati is actually asking for help to turn the so-called Rekall into reality and hoping it would spur the interest of (possibly wealthy) wannabe customers, it even dropped five photos of the design study.

The Subaru BRZ has that sweet cult car status because of the general aura surrounding the Subaru as a car brand. Such popularity is similar to the love other Japanese brands get from the U.S. car-aficionado public - think Toyota or Honda - and whenever these makers drop a new model, the rip curls reaches every corner of the car world and other related areas.

X-Tomi Design’s take on a would-be Subaru BRZ STI hasn’t gone unnoticed so following the same thematic, it’s time to bring a marvellous set of renders to your attention, this time signed by Khyzyl Saleem.

There’s something innate at Volkswagen Group about allowing trainees to develop their own ideas in terms of what a car should look like.

Just look at what Volkswagen has been doing in the past years at Wörthersee, where a wacky Golf is unveiled with clockwork precision every year, and it’s entirely imagined and designed by the brand’s apprentices. And Audi just copied the recipe.

BMW kind of broke the internet with the new M3 and M4. By slapping the sedan and coupe with the bucktooth grille introduced by the 4 Series, the Bavarians did enough to spark a lot of controversy among gearheads.

Since then, we’ve seen tuning companies trying to capitalize on BMW’s grille by offering kits that decrease those vertical kidneys to more eye-friendly proportions and even big-name designers giving their two cents on it. But maybe the problem wasn’t the grille, but the rest of the car. Maybe the M4 looks better with a more utilitarian vibe to it.

Porsche has been around for almost 90 years, and in that time, the German automaker has been responsible for bringing to life some of the most beautiful cars the world has ever seen. From the legendary 356 to the 959 to the 911 to the 918 Spyder, the list of oh-so-beautiful Porsches that have hit the market runs long and proud. But as many as these models are, can you imagine how many designs of Porsche models are locked in a vault inside Porsche’s design studio in Weissach?

These models were never seen because they never made it to production, and while it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see any of them in real form, Porsche is taking the unprecedented step of pulling the curtains on these designs, revealing them for the very first time.

Nowadays, the internet is packed with talented artists that render all sorts of impressive cars. Whether designed from scratch or based on existing cars, many of them are so cool that they deserve a place on an assembly line. This race-inspired Porsche 911 created by Khyzyl Saleem is definitely one of them.

Since the Mercedes-AMG One supercar is still in hiding, pixel manipulators are taking matters into their own hands. The latest one to do so is Rain Prisk, who imagined a hypothetical Affalterbach born and raised supercar aimed at the Audi R8, as he puts it.

You could argue that the arrival of Maserati’s MC20 sports car has been a sort of breath of fresh air for the Italian carmaker. While every static review, vlog, or walkaround of the MC20 has been ecstatic (pun intended), there have been people arguing that the MC20 is far from the animal we knew as the MC12.

However, perhaps some of the naysayers could be silenced if Maserati decided to build this GT Targa.