Bertone built this on a Mazda 323 chassis in 1981 — the most sensible car of its moment used as a skeleton for something that looked like it had no business existing. Marc Deschamps ran the design, and the result is a gold wedge that still looks a little unhinged forty years later.
The thing that actually gets you is the glass. The greenhouse is enormous, almost aggressively open, and it bleeds all the way down into the rear fascia — body and glass split roughly fifty-fifty, which gives the whole car this strange floating quality, like the roof isn't quite attached. The pop-up headlights and the tall vertical tail lights at the C-pillars eventually made it into real Mazda production cars. The drag coefficient was 0.28, which for 1981 was genuinely impressive.
Inside, they got rid of the steering wheel entirely and replaced it with a rubber belt running around a rectangular frame — you slid it left or right to steer. A small colour CRT screen sat in the centre where gauges would normally be. The front seats swivelled outward to let you in.
It debuted at the 1981 Tokyo Motor Show, then quietly disappeared into a Mazda warehouse for forty years until someone stumbled across it in 2020. They sent it to Turin for restoration, and now it exists again.
It just looks cool. That's the whole argument.
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