This is one of those high-flying ideas that you just hope and pray becomes reality for the average bloke, or at least the average well-heeled bloke, will someday be able to buy and enjoy on the road. This week, Jaguar has unveiled its first all-electric sports car, the Vision Gran Turismo Coupe, the rollout taking place at the Gran Turisno World Tour happening in Tokyo. It was envisioned from the ground up as an all-electric, all-wheel drive racing car for competition in global GT series. It utilizes a trio of compact electric motors to produce an output, measured in pferdestarke, as 1,020 units, the equivalent of about 1,005hp. By golly, just gaze upon those body lines. The Vision looks like a weapon that the Car Acrobatic Team might have wielded on Speed Racer.
There’s a hitch to all of this wonder, of course. The Vision, at least for right now, is a virtual car, created under the tutelage of Jaguar design chief Julian Thomson for players to select in the online Gran Turismo game, the brainchild of gaming wizard Kazunori Yamauchi. The Vision was drawn to evoke, even in the most distant way, the glory of Jaguar sports races from eons past such as the C-Type and D-Type. The Vision Gran Turismo Coupe will be available for players to download in Gran Turismo Sport for Sony PlayStation 4 from the end of November. Take some hope, though, because landmark production automobiles have been born of conceptualization more indirect than this in the past.
Jim Donnelly On Wheels 