Design Study

Looking at the recent industry trends, the Lancer nameplate has more chances of being brought back as a crossover/SUV than in a continuation of a legendary lineage of cars. For the time being, the Mitsubishi Lancer is not making a comeback in any form, but we’d love it if it looked like this.

With so many past nameplates making a comeback these days – most of them in the wrong guise, as SUVs or crossovers – it wouldn’t hurt if Toyota decided to revive the MR2, it’s much-praised mid-engine sports car from the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Chevrolet got the performance right for its first-ever mid-engine production car but in doing so, it kind of missed the whole point of what a well-made interior should look and feel like. But what if the carmaker came up with a next-generation C9 that had a more European flavor and looked like Leyang Bai’s design study?

We recently covered a rendering, which gave us an idea of how a Toyota GR86 Convertible could look like. Now, the Hungarian virtual design studio – X-Tomi Design – is giving us another great idea. They’ve taken the Toyota GR86 and decided to make a shooting break out of it. We have to admit, the results are quite good. The Shooting brake concept is a very old one. It dates back to the 1800s and the first shooting brake cars were manufactured in Britain.

The Toyota GR86 is certainly one of the more pleasant surprises in the automotive world. In times when cars are becoming bigger, heavier, and much more complex, car enthusiasts begged for a car that’s simple, sporty, and relatively attainable. That being said, the Toyota GR86 may be available as both a Toyota and a Subaru product, but it only comes in coupe form. Although we definitely don’t mind that, some of us have wondered how a convertible version would look like.

We were blessed with cars since the late 19th century. Up to this point, we’ve had the pleasure of witnessing, touching, and even driving some epic stuff. We’ve also seen many epic comebacks and spiritual successors of legendary cars. With this in mind, the Mercedes SLR McLaren is one of those cars that, we think, deserves a reboot. Apparently, concept artist Georgi Bozhkov thinks the same, as he is introducing us to one of his latest works.

You know that a car is well loved among car enthusiasts when people are coming up with modern takes on the said car. Case in point: Rain Prisk latest set of renderings that look to bring a contemporary vibe to the Toyota AE86.

In case you’re not up to date with news coming from Maranello, Ferrari hasn’t dropped plans to launch an SUV. At the same time, the Prancing Horse is rather tight lipped about its future Urus fighter, which has left enough leeway for pixel manipulators to roam freely on the fields of creativity. The results aren’t always eye-pleasing.

A digital artist took to Instagram to showcase his rendering of a 10th-generation Lincoln Continental. Abimelec Arellano, who goes by the @abimelecdesign handle on Instagram, created a slammed Continental that features vintage styling twists and all the bells and whistles of a modified luxury sedan.

Penned by Fabrizio Giugiaro, son of the great Giorgetto Giugiaro, at the age of just 26, the BMW Nazca M12 came to life as a working prototype in 1991 only to be followed by an evolved version in 1992, called Nazca C2. It was supposed to replace the M1, but BMW pulled the plug and it never saw production. So, how about a modern-design BMW Nazca C2?

Ford’s plans with the Bronco involve selling a lot of aftermarket bits and bobs on top of the actual cars. This is a move inspired by what Jeep has been doing with Mopar and going further, it is possible that some customers might decide to tune their Broncos to ever greater extents. For those, Chip Foose has an interesting design proposal.

We all look back with nostalgia at rally racing’s notorious rivalry between Mitsubishi and Subaru, more specifically between the Impreza and Lancer Evo. Few people know that Mazda, as it sat on the sidelines, concocted a plan to join the battle on WRC’s grueling stages and even built a prototype to highlight its intentions. Meet the 2000 Mazda 626 MPS Concept.

As soon as the world caught glimpse of the first Cyberpunk screenshots and the cars included in the bug-plagued game, the internet’s pixel manipulators saw they creativity kick in. The result was a long list of eye-candy design studies that tried to forecast what sort of cars we will be driving 20, 30 years from now. Enter the HR-X Delsol.

Although the Mazda RX-7 spawned three generations, it never got a shooting brake variant. And for good reason, since Mazda conceived and developed the RX-7 as a rotary-engine sports car that favored balance, lightness, and nimbleness over anything else.

Some markets got a 2+2 interior layout, and the RX-7 could even be had in convertible form (namely the second-gen FC model). However, the third-gen RX-7 FD was a coupe-only affair. Then came Khyzyl Saleem.

BMW has no plans to build shooting brake and Gran Turismo versions of the M4, but that hasn’t stopped digital artist Sugar Design from imagining what they could look like if the German automaker put them to production. Designed with the familiar styling of a coupé with extended hatchback proportions, the M4 Shooting Brake looks like a car that BMW should build. The M4 Gran Turismo, however, looks like what you’d expect to see from the M3 Gran Turismo if that model ends up becoming a real thing.

We are not saying that here at TopSpeed we have a knack for Porsche or for Khyzyl Saleem. That is easily noticeable from our weekly coverage.

It just so happens that occasionally, we get slapped with a couple of digitally-tweaked images that are so ridiculous that upon closer inspection, they somehow gain awesome status. It’s a must-share situation, really.

It was not that long ago when a brief press blurb from BMW announced the arrival of the BMW M3 Touring. With the said blurb came a darkened picture of the wagon M3’s derriere, which didn’t exactly say much related to what the more practical M3 would look like.

Thankfully, the internet is oozing with skilled pixel manipulators eager to fill in the gap left by the automaker.