The Next Niche: Sports Coupe Pickups? - Brief Article

Automotive Industries,  Nov, 1999  by Lindsay Brooke,  Gail Kachadourian

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Combine a sports coupe and a pickup bed and whaddya got? Maybe the next niche vehicle. At least that's the parallel path that Toyota and Honda are both investigating, as evidenced by the concepts they showed at Tokyo last month. The Toyota Celica Cruising Deck and Honda's Spocket blend the performance of sports coupes with the utility of a pickup.

Based on the 2000 Celica, the Cruising Deck features a rear bed that can lug the usual youth-lifestyle trappings, and can also be reconfigured to create a rear open-air ramble seat The Cruising Deck's chief engineer, Tadashi Nakagawa, says the inspiration is the Ford Model A's rumble seat, but Subaru's BRAT from the 1970s also offered bed-mounted bucket seats.

The equally amusing name for Honda's concept is derived from the words Sports and Pocket -- get it? This beautifully designed morph (done at Honda's California studio) is like a scaled-down LeMans racer, with an open rear bed. Spocket's roof slides back for open-air cruising, and the "cab" bulkhead folds away to reveal a rear-facing back seat. The cargo bed can also be extended lengthwise by folding the rear seatback. Overall, the car looked well thought-out and finished.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Cahners Publishing Company
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group