The seven best ‘80s concept cars

Citroën Karin (1980)

While concept cars are often used to soften up the buying public to a manufacturer’s new design language or test reaction to an upcoming model which, in reality, was signed off months before, sometimes they are a slight-of-hand to distract the audience from the fact that the car maker doesn’t have anything newsworthy on sale. Such was the case with the Citroën Karin after the maker realised it had nothing of note to display at the 1980 Paris Motor Show. Sacré bleu!

Citroën’s design chief Trevor Fiore was sent off with a dream brief: create a vision of future motoring starting from a clean sheet. The result was practically a physical, three-dimensional embodiment of the marque’s double chevron logo; there were triangles everywhere. It also looked rather like someone had shrunk the Louvre Pyramid, painted it brown and put it on wheels, with only the headlights and faired in rear wheels bearing passing resemblance to a production model, the glorious Citroën SM. The inside was even better however, with a three-abreast seating layout that put the driver front and centre decades before the McLaren F1 did and a steering wheel flanked by what appeared to be a Casio calculator on one side and a slide-adjusting graphic equaliser on the other. It made beige look cool.

Lamborghini Athon (1980)

Taking up the design mantle at Carrozzeria Bertone would be daunting enough but when your predecessor penned the Miura and the Countach and your first task is to design a Lamborghini concept car, you better bring your A game. Intended to show support for the financially ailing Lamborghini by demonstrating an expression of its future, the Athon was based on the mid-engined Silhouette production car, sharing its 3.0-litre V8.

Designer Marc Deschamps was perhaps also inspired by the Louvre, had the Athon possessed a roof it wold have shared a similarly pyramid-like profile as the Karin. Deschamps stayed with the established Bertone language of sharp creases, geometrically-shaped panels and innovative glazing, the end result looking like Battlestar Galactica’s runabout. The interior boasted a very early attempt at a touchscreen, complete with early video game graphics, a gearlever which looked like the handle of a carving knife and a steering wheel whose oddly offset single spoke triggers our OCD.

Briggs & Stratton Six-Wheel Hybrid (1980)

Amazingly, this was not the first hybrid concept vehicle, that honour goes to the Fiat 131 Ibrido, which beat Briggs and Stratton to the punch by a matter of months. It only had the four wheels though. The manufacturer of dependable, long-lived lawnmower engines wanted to demonstrate, after a decade of oil crises, that cruising at the US national speed limit of 55mph didn’t need an oversized V8 (Cadillac’s was 8.2-litres), their Model 42 air-cooled 694cc flat-twin would do just as well.

That engine drove the first of the two rear axles with 12 six-volt lead-acid batteries powering the other. Remarkably for the time, these batteries gave the car an electric-only range of 50 miles and helped it to a top speed of 68mph as demonstrated to the press by Richard Petty.

ItalDesign Machimoto (1986)

It’s only when you see press shots of it laden with passengers that the full crazy of the Machimoto becomes apparent. An answer to a question no-one was asking, ‘why don’t we cross a hatchback with a motorcycle?’ the Machimoto could seat up to nine passengers on two rows of tandem bike saddles.

The Golf drivetrain, even the GTI-version as used, would have struggled to move that much mass, that number of passengers not really being fully compensated for by the lack of roof, full windscreen or proper doors. The driver sat behind a steering wheel which also incorporated fold-out handlebars to make it even more unwieldy to steer and it was recommended that all on board wore motorcycle safety gear. Odd that it never took off as an idea.

Pontiac Trans Sport Concept (1986)

Minivans, as the Americans like to call them, are not usually a fertile ground for concept cars, but by the mid-‘80s Pontiac was resurgent after a miserable Malaise-era and confident enough to create the Trans Sport. The helicopter-style split windscreen at the front was necessary to accommodate the two gullwing doors that provided access to the front seats while a single, giant gullwing let passengers into the rear. Presumably the driver had to remember not to park with six-feet of anything on the right-hand side. Both front and rear lights were sleek slits and these sporty stylings were echoed by a roof-mounted rear wing.

The driver got a CRT screen in place of an instrument panel and a heads-up display, while the front-seat passenger sat behind their own screen attached to a roll-put keyboard allowing them to check the weather, get directions and even book hotels. The rear view mirror was replaced with yet another screen. The production Trans Sport launched in 1990 and although it lost a lot of the extremes of the concept’s design it still stood out in a bland, boxy market.

Bertone Genesis (1988)

Looking at that picture, what would you expect to find powering the second of our Bertone concepts? Surely not a Lamborghini V8 like the Athon? Nope, actually it was Lamborghini V12, mated to a three-speed Chrysler Torque-flite automatic gearbox. The 5.2-litre engine was lifted directly from the Countach Quattrovalvole, which meant it produced 455PS, and was front-mounted lying partially under the front seats which were accessed via gullwing doors. Sliding rear doors provided access to the sumptuous reclining rear seats with adjustable leg rests.

The entire cabin was trimmed in cream and red Alcantara, which doesn’t sound enormously practical for a family four-seater. It wasn’t exactly a modern-day Lamborghini Marzal – the car which gave us the stunning Espada – but it was a fully functional concept that Bertone had invested tens of thousands of man-hours in. We’re just not sure why.

Plymouth Voyager III (1989)

Minivans, three-seaters and six-wheels seem to be the design tropes of the 1980s, but it wasn’t until the tail-end of the decade that someone thought to combine them all. Plymouth, recognising that Americans were apt to buy cars far larger than they needed, mistakenly believed that they wanted an alternative. The resulting Plymouth Voyager III was therefore not one car but two. Car number one was a compact, three-cylinder, propane-burning, front-wheel-drive hatchback with three-abreast seating perfectly sized for the city commute.

Its companion vehicle was an attachable pod, with its own engine and double rear axle, which could be mated to the hatchback to provide total passenger carrying capacity of 11. The two engines gave the car four-wheel-drive and, Plymouth claimed, similar power output to a traditional V8. The rear wheels of the front section retracted upwards when the cars were joined to prevent steering problems, sadly hiding the fact that this over-complicated behemoth was in fact an eight-wheeler.

Lamborghini image courtesy of RM Sotheby’s.