Toyota GT86 Saloon and Shooting Brake?

Part of reading the hundreds of news items that come our way every day is building a mental map of the stories announcing radical changes to a model or a new version, a new engine or a new bodystyle. It happened before with the rumour of a hybrid GT-86, and now even more so with the saloon and shooting brake versions of the popular coupé.

Don’t be alarmed yet, since it seems the saloon and shooting brake variants were two of the alternatives considered for when the time came to expand the GT-86 range. According to Tetsuya Tada, product chief at Toyota, his bosses reportedly disapproved of such ideas, asking for absolute focus on the coupé version.

What is interesting is that a good amount of time has passed since the studies to turn the Japanese coupé into a saloon and shooting brake were carried out in secret by the design team. Now that the FT-86 Open concept was presented in Geneva, with a view to production, rumours of more bodystyle variants could well be possible.

According to Tada, Toyota could spread development costs across more models, if they decide to have other GT-86 variants. I think that anyone who has bought or wants to buy a coupé in the style of the GT-86 won’t be interested in a saloon or a shooting brake; perhaps the convertible, a segment that has always been more closely related to coupés, would be the natural choice, but I don’t see how something that will be totally different can fit in with Toyota and Subaru’s fashionable coupé.

Meanwhile, and continuing with the exercise of imagination, the main photo shows one of the designs by Theophilus Chin, Photoshop wizard, so that you too can picture a GT-86 saloon.

Via | Car Session