Have you ever wondered what those futuristic video game cars would look like in real life? Infiniti is giving you the opportunity with its Concept Vision Gran Turismo, which usually resides in the GT universe.
The car was developed in close collaboration with the developers at Gran Turismo, Polyphony’s digital game franchise that has sold more than 72 million games worldwide. The Vision GT will be one of the stars of the new Gran Turismo Sport game coming in November 2016.
The car was actually designed as an part of a global Infiniti design competition to create a pure Infiniti GT car. The final design was submitted by the design team in Beijing, created to display themes of sensuality, power and a bit of audacity. The ultimate goal was to design an ambitious racing car for Infiniti.
As with most designs, it developed from a hand sketch (not sure if it was on a bar napkin, as these things often seem to be), refined digitally and then further by hand sculpting, before returning to the digital world for final refinement.
But Nissan says it went much further, with analysis and calculations of technical features such as aerodynamics and engine performance of the front mid-ship powerplant. For example, the designers were able to virtually distribute weight 45:55 (front to rear), and the underbody air-flow control, front and rear diffusers and rear spoiler to maintain design integrity without sacrificing handling.
This is the car’s first appearance outside of China, and was brought in to launch the game in the UK, which brought together seven other concepts from the game, including the Nissan Vision 2020.
The cars were created from scratch using the latest digital design tools, and incorporate design cues from the companies’ real world production models, just taken to the fantasy level. Nissan says they represent what future high-performance cars could look like — sleek exteriors to let the air flow around easily, high-downforce bodywork to improve handling, sexy designs to draw attention, etc.