Yamaha pulled the wraps off their new impressive Sports Ride concept, a two-seater sports car design study based on the same innovative architecture with the Motiv city car.
The compact two-seater sports car uses a new carbon-fibre variation of the iStream layout called iStream Carbon, created by McLaren F1-designer Gordon Murray. The new lightweight structure means that the Sports Ride Concept’s total weight is close to 750kg.
Unlike the Motiv.e concept, the Sports Ride uses carbon panels instead of glassfibre ones, with Yamaha wanting to create a sports car that will offer the same kind of excitement with a motorcycle.
The whole concept took about five months to be created from scratch and uses several influences from Yamaha’s motorcycles inside-out. The minimal cabin combines metal, leather and carbon, echoing the lightweight but high-quality image status of the car that could spawn a future Lotus Elise rival.
Yamaha didn’t share any information on what powertrain hides under the skin of the Sports Ride Concept though with rumours talking about an updated version of the three-cylinder 1.0-litre petrol engine used by the Motiv.e which makes around 80hp.
Combined with the really minimal weight, the Sport Ride Concept could just be one of the cheapest and most fun ways of entering the carbon-structured sports cars club.
Yamaha says that the iStream manufacturing process can be used to produce lightweight, high-rigidity models from different segments, from a sports car to a city car to an SUV. The process, created and developed by Murray and his team, involves bonding composite panels to a tubular frame, dropping the production costs and the overall weight of the finished vehicle.
Whether Yamaha will develop a full production version of the Sports Ride Concept in the future remains to be seen, but we don’t think they went this far just to show off.
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