ALL SCI-FI

[bulldogtrekker]

This Fascinating Stillborn VW Prototype Would Have Been Revolutionary
Jason Torchinsky, Jalopnik



By the late '60s, VW was in a legitimate full-on panic about replacing the Beetle: somehow, they never really managed to figure this out. The Beetle was just selling too well for too long to worry until it was almost too late. Eventually, the Golf saved the day, but there was a brief moment where it looked like VW's salvation would be much weirder.

After VW bought NSU and Audi in the late '60s, the much more conventional water-cooled, transverse front-engined Golf/Rabbit was derived from NSU/Audi designs and saved VW's bacon, as well as set the company's fundamental technical DNA to this day. But this was a sort of last-minute desperation plan. The goal of replacing the Beetle as VW's core product went back much further, and almost culminated in a surprisingly sophisticated and unusual car, the EA266 prototype.



The EA266 was developed with assistance from a Porsche team led by Ferdinand Pi??ch ??? the same one who would later become Chairman of the Volkswagen group. The EA266 was a very novel and innovative little car. It broke with VW's traditional tech in some of the same ways as the Golf would, using an inline, water-cooled engine, but unlike the Golf, which used the Mini and contemporary Fiats as templates for its design, the EA266 must have been looking at exotic sportscars, because it was mid-engined, with the drivetrain placed low and in the middle-rear of the car.

The 1588cc inline four was laid flat under the rear seat in a longitudinal configuration with the transaxle directly behind it. The cylinder head was on the left side of the car (facing forward), while the radiator, fan, and other various bits were to the right. The whole unit was sealed in its own little compartment under the rear seat, sort of prefiguring the way the Porsche Boxster/Cayman would tackle this issue in the future.....



If you're a space utilization fetishist like myself, your pants likely look like you're trouser-smuggling a model of a ziggurat right now. The entire length of the car is available for passenger and/or cargo use. Like the earlier VW Type III (or a modern Tesla Model S) there's two luggage areas for use. The difference here is that with the engine so low and flat under the rear seat, that rear cargo area is a deep, full-sized hatch, even in the non-wagon design of the car.....



And that brings up the big question: why was the EA266 cancelled? It was very far along in development, just about ready for production, when it was completely and summarily killed by VW's new boss, fresh from VW Brasil, Rudolph Leiding. In fact, it was killed within three weeks of his taking office, and this was from a man who had always been a champion of novel VW-based variants like the Brasilia and the SP-2, both of which even had a front-end design named after him....

But the EA266 was different. About 16 million marks had already been spent, but Leiding couldn't figure out why so much of that money went to Porsche when VW had its own R&D department. In fact, the scope of the cancellation was even more intense than you'd think. As this Porsche enthusiast site tells it:
this guy [Leiding] then went on to demand that Porsche destroy all prototypes, which they did using, wait for it???Leopard 1 tanks of Porsche's own design to crush them. every single drawing, photograph, note, and napkin with a sketch ordered to be burned???they even cut up Pi??ch's prototype engine.

(BDT: There is one in the VW museum in Wolfsberg, Germany)

[Krel]

That poor engine wouldn't survive one day on New Orleans streets.

David.

[scotpens]

It was certainly a space-efficient design, but rear-seat headroom must have been pretty cramped for an average adult. And what about heat, noise and vibration when you're sitting right on top of the engine?

[Rocky Jones]

It's an interesting design and does manage cargo nicely. As I recall the biggest complaint about rear engine cars was that in a head on crash the engines tend to come forward into the passenger compartment. With such a low-slung engine, this one might just take out your legs, but the rest of you might survive. This car does seem to have a little more distance between the front bumper and the driver than the deadly VW bug did. It doesn't look like there's a lot of protective material up front, though. Hopefully, it would have had a pretty sturdy frame. I suppose you could help things and improve overall stability by throwing a couple of sandbags in the front truck and the rear storage, though.

[Brent Gair]

That looks like the basis of an outstanding sports car.

VW did like to offer sporty offshoots of it's basic chassis and drive train. Witness the Karmen Ghia and the Scirocco (sportified version of the Rabbit...I owned a '77 Scirocco).

I look at that side cutaway view and I'm seeing the makings of a high performance, 2 seat convertible. And VWs of this era were incredibly lightweight. Even my '77 tipped the scales at barely over 1700lbs. That's crazy light by most standards. Hop up that EA266 engine (easy to do with virtually all VWs) and picture a 1600lb sports car with a super low center of gravity. It would be like a Lotus...minus the incompetent British workmanship .

[scotpens]

[bulldogtrekker]

This Is The Most Amazing Honda You've Never Heard Of



Honda isn't really known for its mid-engine cars or all-wheel drive systems. This car is a rarity: One of Honda's few mid-engine cars and it's one of Honda's relatively few AWD cars. It's also small enough to fit on most freight elevators. It's the Honda Z from 1998-2002. Just look at it. This thing rocks.

I'm so fascinated by this car because it's one of the very few examples of a type of car design I always thought there should be more of: A mid-engine car that's not an exotic two seater, but rather a 4+ seater everyday-use car.

There's been remarkably few of these over the years ??? you could argue the Tesla Model S is one, and certain vans like the Toyota Previa, but hardly any conventional passenger cars. VW almost replaced the Beetle with a fascinating mid-engine hatchback, but that was never to be. In fact, the 1998-2002 Honda Z may be the closest car to that stillborn VW.....




LINK:
http://jalopnik.com/this-is-the-most-amazing-honda-youve-never-heard-of-784404318

[bulldogtrekker]

Here is a poster of variations of cars and a van that would use the mid-engine chassis.