What’s The Best Car We Never Got?

It’s a lesson we learn all too soon as car people: the best-looking, most interesting car designs often go unproduced. This is most understandable when it’s a moonshot concept car that is clearly meant only to inform some car-of-the-future ideas, not represent an entire vehicle to be built anytime soon. Trult heartbreaking are the designs that look like they could go into production with the automaker doing little more than saying “OK, do it.” Case in point, the topshot selection (and Matt’s choice for Best Car We Never Got), the Pontiac G8 ST. It’s bummer enough that we only got the G8 sedan for two model years. But this amazing ute version? What a shoulda-been.

Torch still longs for the Volkswagen EA66. From his earlier story on the VW we never got:

If you want a quick summary, EA266 was a Beetle-replacement project developed with assistance from a Porsche team led by Ferdinand Piëch, and was really quite a revolutionary design, or would have been, had it made production.

The core of what made this car so fascinating I think has to do with its incredible packaging design, one that got the absolute maximum amount of usable interior volume possible via some really bold approaches to packaging design. The engine, a liquid-cooled 1588cc inline-four design, was transverse and laid flat under the rear seat, driving the rear wheels via a transaxle; the fuel tank was in front of the dashboard, the spare wheel under the driver’s seat, and there were two good-sized cargo areas, front and rear. It’s an absolute packaging masterpiece

The Bishop shouted out Ford’s supercar on a shoestring that never came to be, the Ford GN34. Just imagine how much fun this would have been:

Ford never really had that Corvette beater that Blue Oval fans wanted, but they seemingly came *this close* to making it happen in the early eighties. A mid-engine design with Italdesign styling and the Yamaha V6 that was used in the Taurus SHO? Yes, please.

Sadly, that Taurus ate up much of the development budget that Ford could ill-afford to spend on a low-selling budget supercar, or even a Fiero competitor.

Your turn:

What’s The Best Car We Never Got?