Even the least interesting cars can be elevated to some level of intriguing via a special edition. Whether it’s just an appearance package or more serious massaging, these short-run factory-sanctioned customs can add some fun to what are often otherwise milquetoast rides.
And indeed, there have been some wild ones over the years; consider the Bon Jovi VW Golf, AMC’s “Levis Gremlin” with an interior slathered in ersatz denim, and the “Motor Trend Car of the Year Edition” Renault Alliance, to name just a few specials that fresh cosmetic spins on basic transpo. For a more special Special Edition with a substantial deviation from standard-model specs, consider the AMC Hurst SC/Rambler that boosted AMC’s econo-coupe to 315 horsepower and outfitted it for NHRA F/Stock drag racing.
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The fact that these special edition cars existed might have you believe the ones below were also actual things. They are not, and the stories that present them are (mostly) not true, but don’t let the fact that they’re pure fabrications stop you from enjoying their absurdity.
Chrysler: You Made A Race Car Out Of What?
“We have to win in this series” yelled then-Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca from behind his desk. “We once owned NASCAR and now we can’t field a competitive car?”
How the mighty do fall. In the sixties, Mopars dominated the NASCAR scene with iconic cars like the Dodge Charger Daytona and Plymouth Superbird. Legendary starts of the series aligned themselves with brand, as Richard Petty became famous behind the wheel of Chrysler products.
As the seventies wore on, Chrysler’s financial woes were compounded in the sport by cars that simply couldn’t match the aerodynamics of the GM and Ford offerings. However, for 1980 Chrysler launched the Aspen/Volare-based Mirada coupe, which appeared on the surface to be relatively sleek ray of hope for the time.
Iacocca personally called Petty to have him test a NASCAR version of the new Mirada, which took place in front of 15,000 fans. Despite looking great as a race car, the Mirada was unfortunately a good 8MPH off of the rest of the contenders in the field.
Oddly enough, Chrysler’s fancier version of the Mirada (the bustlebacked Imperial) was more aerodynamic and did better on the track, but there was little interest from Mopar in racing something that looked like their star-crossed flagship.
The poor testing results prompted Petty’s defection to GM and Mopar essentially abandoning its racing efforts.
NOTE: thus far, the story is true, and Lee Iacocca let this defeat go and moved on. In my alternate history below, however, Lee fought on:
The shift to front-drive K-car chassis vehicles had left Mopar with few products to fit the third-generation, rear-drive 110” wheelbase template of a NASCAR entry. “There has to be some way to make a car that will stand a chance of winning,” said Iacocca. “Can’t we cobble together the examples needed for homologation from what we have?”
The product planners were terrified of what Lee would say next, as even Lee couldn’t stand the rear-drive cars Chrysler was still making. These were holdovers from the dark years when he started at the company and paid out millions in recall costs for these crappy cars (namely the Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volare). “I’ve heard that GM is considering putting a pointy nose and glass back on their G-body Monte Carlos and Grand Prix, so we could do that.” Everyone’s worst fears were realized. “How about we find some Imperial front clips, get some slick glass hatchbacks made and stick them on a Diplomat or something?”
He couldn’t be serious, could he? The new-for-1978 Diplomat was shown in brochures with old people getting into them; actual old people and not forty-somethings with dyed-grey hair! Who does that? There wasn’t even a pretense that these weren’t uncool in civilian non-cop format.
Iacocca WAS serious; someone grabbed a poor Diplomat from the assembly line and brought it under the knife to do the changes Mr. Iacocca suggested:
The Imperial nose was grafted in place, the trunk lid and rear window ripped off and replaced by a massive glass hatch. Thus the Dodge 600 Talladega was born, employing the racetrack name Lee had used on their Torino NASCAR legend when he was still working for Ford:
This odd concoction was named for the new-at-the-time “large” Dodge 600 sedan in order to promote that product, the joke being that this Diplomat Talladega shared exactly nothing with that front drive K-based sedan. Here is the animation of the changes:
With blacked-out trim, the homologation special barely sold 500 units needed to qualify this Frankenstein for racing and priced out higher than a top-level Fifth Avenue; nearly as much as a Corvette. The stock cop-spec 318 V8 was hardly a modern-day hemi, and the chassis dating back to the Dodge Dart was not going to carve any canyon roads. At least the hatchback glass made it more useable as a normal car: too bad it leaked on your luggage.
The competition model did win a few races, but not enough to make it worth the effort and anything more than a footnote in Mopar’s great NASCAR history.
AMC: You’d Think The French Would Like Weird Cars, Right?
“That’s a bit much, Mr. Teague,” said the product VP. Indeed, AMC design chief Dick Teague had always created rather controversial-looking machines like the Pacer, and now he’d made a latter-day version of his odd Gremlin on the new Spirit coupe called the Kammback.
Ah, but Dick took it a step further. AMC had just released the ground-breaking crossover Eagle, an all-wheel-drive version of its Hornet-based Concord; Teague decided to put these underpinnings beneath this proto-Gremlin. Dubbed the Eagle Kammback, Dick was having a hard time trying to justify this thing to the product team.
The larger Eagle’s front grille, lights, and wheels were ostensibly supposed to help this chopped-down hatchback appear to be a normal car, but they ended up making it look like a five-year-old wearing dad’s suit.
“It looks like a Gremlin on stilts, Dick. It’s extremely funky looking. I can sell “funky” on, say, a Jeep CJ. But on a passenger car? I don’t know.”
Teague knew the marketing guy was right, but thankfully he had an idea based on what the VP had just said. Grabbing his best photo retoucher, Teague went back to the studio to create his new concept. If the Kammback was too funky for a car but OK for a Jeep, why not make it a Jeep? AMC never had any money to spend, so Dick proposed minor modifications. With a few changes, the Kammback became the “Jeep Sportster.”
Here you can get a better sense of the changes with the animation:
The seven-slot grille and round lights work well with the small hood scoop-like trim that matches the shape of the SJ Cherokee’s front end. The spare tire could be mounted on a pivot-out frame Jeep-style in back (to access the hatch), and new taillights with backup lamps at the top were similar to the “box” lights used on the Jeep CJ. A fabric or glass sunroof could give open-air options, and white “spoker” wheels completed the transformation into a Jeep-branded machine that resembled something like the much-loved Lada Niva (but far easier to live with than that rather agricultural Russian truck).
Remember, at the time the Jeep CJ was far less car-like than the YJ or later Wrangler descendants that followed, so a car-based off-roader would have been extremely welcome to most buyers that didn’t want the hair-shirt punishing off-roader experience (we’re not all David Tracys here).
Some 2,000 Jeep Sportsters were made and they sold out rapidly, far quicker than the stock Eagle Kammback was moving off lots, but at this point, Renault (AMC’s parent company) didn’t see a future for it and pushed American Motors to devote more development energy to launching and pushing the new Alliance and Encore. The French industrial giant dumped all of the Kammback models, including the Sportster: a missed opportunity for a company that definitely could have used any break they could get.
Ford: SHO Me The Sports Car
Nobody on the Ford product team was happy that their proposed Fiero fighter was dead in the water. Pontiac had managed to slip their “commuter car” through the powers that be at GM to beat Ford at getting the first mid-engined American sports car to market.
Ford had proposed a powerful competitor to the Fiero. The GN34 (which we’ve mentioned a few times like here and here) went through a variety of versions, starting with an Ital Design concept called the Maya:
Nearly ready to hit production with a Yamaha-developed twin cam head V6, the GN34’s performance was supposedly going to match the Corvette and other exotics, though the finalized exterior seen in Steve Saxty’s Secret Fords Volume II was arguably a bit clunky compared to the initial design.
Ultimately the whole GN34 project was axed, likely in small part due to the limited sales of the Pontiac competitor. “This was going to be a testbed for the Yamaha V6 before we put it into the Taurus”, said product planner Dave, raising his hands in protest. Indeed, the GN34 was going to precede the Taurus SHO into the market as the first appearance of this motor; experiencing teething problems with a low-production coupe would be better than in a higher-volume, higher-profile BMW fighter sedan (Note: so far, this is all a true story). “There has to be some way to salvage this”.
Ann was new to the team, the only woman in a very misogynistic 1980s office, so she only spoke when an epic idea hit her, and she had one. “We do have bodies for the soon-to-be-ditched Ford EXP”. Indeed, the second-generation Escort-based two-seater was headed for the chopper due to low sales, and it was as close as the Blue Oval had to a small sports car.
“Seriously?” quipped Dave, visibly annoyed. “That 220 horsepower will rip the tires off of the front wheels,” he said with a smug look. Ann took a sip of coffee and looked Dave square in the face. “Who says I was gonna put it up front?” She was right: this could be the quick way to the mid-engined sports car that everyone on the team wanted, a sort of Fiero done in the style of the infamous Renault 5 Turbo.
The project was allowed to move ahead, and Ann was able to guide the team responsible. Down in engineering, an EXP mule had its Escort powertrain removed and a SHO motor and five-speed manual plopped in back under a fabricated steel box and tubular reinforcements that made the thing stiffer than the original car. To avoid ruffling division feathers (cough … Mustang GT), this SHO EXP was sold at Lincoln-Mercury dealers.
Named the Cyclone, it took the moniker of the Mercury coupe that NASCAR drivers of the sixties made famous. A different Mercury-style light bar nose and pop-up headlight “eyelids” sat in front of the hood, which now covered the spare tire, radiator, and a small “frunk” space. The lower “slant nose” front clip’s fenders angled down lower than the EXP and were made of fiberglass to save weight (and eliminate the need for new metal stamping dies). The rear spoiler was sprayed body-colored to help visually enhance a “wedge” shape.
A skinny luggage area behind the engine in back sat below the hatch. Different taillights and slightly flared rear fenders to cover the wider rear track finished the look. It was hardly a thing of beauty, but it doesn’t appear that GN34 would have been a drop-dead gorgeous entry in the market anyway. Besides, the Cyclone embraced the “little brute” appearance like the mid-engined Le Car had done.
The end result is sort of cartoonish but in a fun and aggressive way, as this animation shows:
The light weight meant that the Cyclone was a nimble thing, and blisteringly fast. According to contemporary tests, the Cyclone could hit sixty in well under five seconds. Of course, the project coincided with the end of EXP body shell production, and the cost to make this monster was steep. Indeed, the Cyclone’s price approached the hailing distance of the Corvette, though admittedly the performance and handling of this funny little car rivaled twice-as-expensive contemporary exotics like a Ferrari 348tb. Lincoln-Mercury dealers were as confused on how to sell this thing as they were when they had Detomaso Panteras on the showroom floor in the early seventies. Only 3,768 Cyclones were built before Ford pulled the plug on what they knew was going to be essentially a work-the-bugs-out-of-an-engine boondoggle to begin with.
Still, it was a fun project that the press ate up, and one green-lit by Bill himself. Which Bill? The man with his last name in the Blue Oval on every car he sold, that’s who. Product planner Dave? He ended up working for Ann, and he was not happy.
(Oddly enough, in real life, Ford would later put the SHO V6 into the back of the tiny Festiva subcompact to create an even more absurd thing called the SHOgun with extra engines. At least I hope they were extra engines, or else somewhere Fiesta-powered Taurus sedans would exist. Do you call them “No Guns?”)
General Motors: Bustin’ The Dust In A Hurst
Oldsmobile has always been a rather confusing brand to me. At one point, they were a “near luxury” division that, for a time, had seemingly eight of the top ten cars on the Top Ten Best Sellers list, and all of them were different versions of Cutlass. The name fell out of favor rather quickly, and GM’s last-ditch attempt to make them a sort of neo-Lexus in the late nineties failed to save it from demise in 2004. Generally, it was a car for people that might have wanted a Cadillac but “just didn’t want to be so showy”.
At the same time, Olds offered some seemingly out-of-character-for-them performance coupes like the Oldsmobile 442 versions of the Cutlass with, as the name stated, four barrels, four speeds, and two exhaust pipes. These were the sophisticated intermediate GM cars, sort of a yin to the Chevelle SS’s yang. In 1968, Hurst Performance chose Oldsmobile as the brand to create showcase cars for their famous and popular shifters with “Hurst” branded editions.
The Hurst treatment was done to a variety of 442 Cutlass models, slowly losing performance with the malaise era and concluding with a G-Body version featuring the bizarre “lightning rods” shifter that Jason has written about.
You can imagine a marketing meeting in the early nineties where people were desperate to prove out the ad campaign of the time that claimed this GM division was “not your father’s Oldsmobile.” “What if we revive the Hurst editions?” one exec would quip. “We could,” said another “but our only performance coupe is a dinky Calais, and that’s just not going to move the needle”. The last suit in the room agreed; “Yeah, I mean, shit, we’d be better off putting the Hurst name on that stupid van of ours”. The “stupid van” he was referring to was the Silhouette, Oldsmobile’s version of the infamous Dustbuster-shaped Pontiac Trans Sport.
Suddenly the room went silent. The poor bugger was only joking, but he was right. What this guy didn’t know until they called Hurst later was that the performance firm had been working on a “Tiptronic” style manual shifter for an automatic but really needed a partner to work with on the hardware and software to sync up with an electronic slushbox.
From this meeting, the Oldsmobile Hurst/Olds Silhouette 25th Anniversary Edition was born, featuring a manually-shiftable four-speed automatic hooked up to a motor that had an aftermarket supercharger sitting on top. Styling changes had to happen as well to the stock Silhouette:
Contractor ASC added big wheels and tires, complemented by a ground effects kit; the nose was made more aggressive with the sunken rectangular lights from the European market Pontiac Trans Sport. A “loop” spoiler on the roof blended in with body-colored trim that blocked off a section of the “C” pillar. A large ASC glass electric sunroof was installed in the black-painted roof. Like Hurst/Olds in days of yore, it was flashy but not too flashy.
Once again, the animation gives you a better look at the changes:
Inside, ASC started with the stock Silhouette cabin.
In the Hurst version, two-tone leather seats flank a cup holder center console with the unique shifter, and controls for the add-on sunroof were installed to the left of the steering wheel. An aftermarket LED supercharger gauge mounts below the base of the windshield, and you know we’re going to add a Hurst/Olds logo somewhere on that vast expanse of dash (here on the airbag cover).
Silly? Sure, but with the supercharger and manually shiftable automatic, the Hurst/Olds Silhouette was more than an appearance package and a relatively high-performance people carrier, a nonexistent thing at the time.
The run of 1625 Hurst Silhouettes sold out surprisingly quickly and remains possibly the only collectible minivan to this day. Sadly, none of this was enough to save the fabled Lansing, Michigan brand from ultimate extinction.
Surely you have ideas, too
As usual, I’ve made up a bunch of nonsensical cars as a joke where, in a few cases, I actually wouldn’t mind if a few of them existed for at least a drive around the block. Others, well, let’s just say that we dodged a bullet.
Autopians have pretty wild imaginations, and I love to see what our collective hive mind can come up with. What crazy special edition cars do you wish existed, if for no other reason than to get a few giggles out of? Let us know!
I Made Our Daydreaming Designer Imagine An Oldsmobile For Actual Old People – The Autopian
Our Daydreaming Designer Imagines Corvette Sedan And Wagon In 1978 – The Autopian
This was extremely well done and entertaining. These are awesome! Another job well done Bishop!
How bout a Chang Li Jason Voorhees Friday the 13th Edition? It would be a tribute and gift to Torch since he made that funny story of taking a chainsaw to his batteries
I have a question for His Lordship, The Bishop: would you consider illustrating a couple of our ideas in the comments for a future article?
Technically, I am actually building something that kind of fits this category – a 1966 VC Valiant ute ‘converted’ to a 1963 AP5 ute by swapping the front panels, dash etc.
But the imaginary story behind this car is that it was originally built by Chrysler Australia as a test of the idea of a ute body style, which wasn’t actually available until the restyled AP6 replaced the AP5. It was then sent to Chrysler in the US so they could evaluate it for possible US production, and was then fitted with ‘futuristic’ features such as inbuilt navigation, fuel injection etc and toured motor shows badged as the ‘Plymouth Astro-Jet’.
Once it had done the rounds of shows it was put aside, with nobody at Chrysler having any further use for it. In 1966 a bunch of US drag racers shipped their drag cars to Australia for the ‘1966 Drag-Fest’ (an actual event which was a series of drag events at various drag strips up and down the east coast of Australia, and was arguably the beginning of drag racing in Australia as a professional sport). As one of the racers had Chrysler sponsorship they were offered the ute as a ‘pit car’, and took it with them on the boat. After the event, when the drag cars were shipped back to the US, it was decided not to ship the ute back as Chrysler US didn’t need it any more, and it ended up parked unused in a shed for decades before I ‘found’ it, pulled it out and got it running again, complete with dents, paint damage etc, but still with the show paint job and all the extra features and customisation.
I would drive the shit out of that Cyclone and the Silhouette.
Me too – those are the cream of the crop!
Here’s one recent idea that I don’t think will happen… take the new Tesla Cybercab… add bucket seats and the regular driver controls from a Tesla Model 3 and call it the Tesla Model 3 Sport Coupe… available in RWD and AWD forms.
The rear engine/rwd Cyclone is a great idea, following the same original formula as the Fiero. FWD drivetrain and suspension, rotated 180* (from the Taurus SHO) and boom, super car.
Although, when I first saw EXP and SHO I thought you would be installing it in the front. The Escort/EXP had the same engine compartment as the Tempo/Topaz. Back in the early 00s, one of the guys on the Tempo forums wedged an SHO V6/5-spd manual into a 93 Topaz 2-door. So, if it fits in the Topaz (just barely), it would fit in the EXP as well in the front. hmm….
These are all AWESOME! (some for being great, some for being bad!) I immediately thought Lada Niva when I started reading the AMC/Jeep section. I fell in love with that car when I took a trip to Russia in 2019. I’d buy the Cyclone for sure. I’ve got a pile of SHO parts, been looking for a wagon for them, but now I’m intrigued with this possibility! And, I love me a hot rod minivan!
That Mercury Cyclone looks pretty good.
The rest looks garbage.
I’ll be honest: That “Jeep Sportster”? Shut up and take my money.
“Special editions that never were”? Being a generally silly person, I’d vote for crossover branding (e.g. Levi’s Gremlin, Bill Blass Lincoln, Eddie Bauer Explorer/Bronco), but involving bad puns on the model name. For the sportsmen: the Plymouth Barracuda Grady White Edition. Or the AMC Marlin Boston Whaler Edition. Or the Chevrolet Impala SS Deer Co-cain Edition.
Or the Chrysler Newport Newport Edition, with an exclusive white and green paint scheme, and a cabin air purifier as standard equipment.
Not by itself, no. But the success of a special edition minivan sparked by an off-the-cuff remark coupled with the rising popularity of the Brand’s Bravada luxury SUV led to a transformative product inspired by a joking portmanteau created in another product planning meeting – “Tahoronado.”
The “eff-85-it” spirit of a division that had seen sales collapse to less than half those of its glory days in the ’70s and ’80s led them to replace the fabled but by then poor-selling personal luxury coupe with a highly-trimmed and supercharged limited-production version of the two-door, full-sized Blazer/Yukon. If the Hursr Silhouette was a surprise, the Toronado SUV – the first model with that name with rear wheels driven along with the front – was a shock.
Tastefully distinguished from its cousins by light ribbed cladding, monochromatic trim and a vista-windowed roofline originated in the 1960s Vista Cruiser and recently seen in the just-discontinued Custom Cruiser, the prototype displayed at the 1993 Chicago Auto Show attracted a surprising amount of interest for a vehicle intended to use up an excess of two-door body shells as Chevy and GMC pivoted to producing four-door versions for the 1995 model year, and the 2,000-unit production run sold out 98 hours after GM started accepting orders in July. A second 2,000-unit run was quickly produced, and a fully-loaded, four-door, supercharged version entered into regular production alongside the Tahoe and Yukon for 1995.
The success of a SUV focused on luxury and all-road capability that debuted two years before Lincoln entered the market segment with its Navigator rejuvenated the 100-year-old nameplate. The Aurora that heralded a new direction for Oldsmobile was quickly transformed into a luxury crossover to rival the 1998 Lexus RX (usually trouncing it in buff book comparisons, if only rarely exceeding it in sales), while Ithe eventual introduction of Cadillac’s Escalade led Olds to move the Toronado name to the a new “SUV coupe” version of the Aurora with a longer, swoopy body with a wire bent glass rear greenhouse that imparted a degree of – dare we say it? – sex appeal to the segment. German automakers tried to emulate the Toronado with coupe-like versions of their midsized SUVs that were derided as the ugliest vehicles of the decade.
Oldsmobile was once again hot. Sales numbers and market share weren’t as high as in the peak years of the 1970s. but profitability was far higher and plans to terminate the division were tossed out the window. The personal-use market rapidly moved from GMC to Olds, leaving the truck division to fleet and commercial vehicles. The Cutlass name was revived as a pickup sub-brand for the Cutlass Canyon (Olds’s counterpart to the Chevy Colorado) and Cutlass Sierra (Chevy Silverado), with the latter’s ad campaign with celebrity sex symbols – female and male – reminding the public to spell it “this time, with an S” that obliterated any memory of the old “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” tagline while also subtly sending it up becoming an unforgettable part of pre-Great Recession pop culture.
Sadly, what went up eventually had to come down. The relative economy of Olds crossovers compared to the body-on-frame Chevys and Cadillacs helped it weather the Great Recession, but an attempt to revive the attitude of the defunct Hummer on a unibody platform went poorly. The lowered shipping crate look wasn’t well received. and an unfortunate vocal elision when the upcoming “Cutlass Hummer” was announced at the 2017 Chicago Show (which wasn’t helped as a shower of foam poured forth onto the display behind the speaker) provided an easy target for Olds’s enemies. Mothers And Others Opposing Fun In Life (MAOOFIL), which announced a boycott in response to the Cutlass Sierra launch campaign that quickly failed, pounced on the purportedly obscene model name at a time when ubiquitous video manipulation software and an increasing tendency to believe bullshit without questions made their actions much easier to sell. Sales in the South and Midwest didn’t fully recover until pandemic-era shortages made buyers reconsider the brand, and a surprising simultaneous increase in sales on the East and West coasts didn’t quite offset the losses.
Hear me out: a Second World War Victory 50th Anniversary Edition of the 1995 Buick LeSabre. It’s the grandpa-iest of grandpa cars. It comes with the supercharged 3800 from the Park Avenue Ultra so granddad can feel like he’s flying his P-38 again, but it’s otherwise a trim package, with an old-fashioned “bombsight” hood ornament and the ribbon for the World War Two Victory Medal on the fenders and trunk lid.
Inside, on the steering wheel, is Harley Earl’s original LeSabre emblem–a red-white-blue roundel with an inverted three-pointed star, symbolizing German technological superiority (the three-pointed Mercedes-Benz star) overthrown by the Allies (those colors being the colors of the British, French, and American flags). I can’t find a good picture of this on the internet right now, but it’s barely visible on the steering wheel here.
Cadillac introduced the CTS-V back in 2005. The marketing heavily promoted that it was developed on the Nurburgring, Cadillac finally had an answer to AMG and the BMW m3 and m5.
I always imagined the conversation at the Cadillac dealer went something like this when grandpa came in looking for his last ride.
Salesman: and the CTS-V was tested at the nurgburgring over in Germany to refi-
Gramps, interrupting: Hold on a damn minute!! I know where Nurgburg is, we flattened a bunch of krauts there back in 45. But what in the hell does that have to do with Cadillac?!?!?!?!?!