Japanese exotics and visions that never made it into the series
Thirty-one years ago, Honda was still talking about a twelve-cylinder sports car. At the time, Honda's head of development Nobuhiko Kawamoto said that it would be lightweight and perhaps distribute two liters of displacement across the twelve pots. The engine had to come from a different technical culture, Kawamoto also said in an interview, and saw possible technical influences in Formula 1 and motorcycle racing.
Well, the later Honda NSX did come with a comparatively well-behaved six-cylinder engine, but at least it was mounted in front of the rear axle as announced.
In issue 23/1987 of Auto Motor und Sport, the article on the Japanese concept cars from Tokyo showed that not everything always turns out as expected. They were ready for series production, the Nissan with the Ferrari look as well as the Honda with a twelve-cylinder engine.
However, the Nissan Mid 4-II never reached series production; the picture above shows what it would have looked like. Neither did the Toyota AXV-II with the butterfly doors on the cover.
However, the bold designs of the Japanese clearly showed that they had long since outgrown the age of copying in the 1980s.
