BMW always brings something special to the annual Villa d’Este auto festival, which is taking place this weekend on the shore of Italy’s Lake Como. Last year it paraded the new M4 CSL, in 2019 it displayed a ground-up recreation of the 1970 Bertone Garmisch concept, and this year it’s turned up with a bread van-shape Z4 wagon concept that appears to tip a hat to the iconic ‘Clown Shoe’ Z3 M Coupe of the late 1990s.
Show cars like this new BMW Concept Touring Coupe are usually created to subtly get us used to new design ideas that an automaker plans to introduce in the coming years. The gullwing-door Z9 from 1999, for instance, paved the way for the production 6-Series that would appear four years later and got us ready for Chris Bangle’s radical flame-surfacing design language.
Related: BMW Concept Touring Coupe Heralds The Return Of The ‘Clown Shoe’ Shooting Brake
We’re guessing there are hints to the upcoming 5-Series Touring in the latest concept’s rear end treatment, but the potential volumes for a two-door wagon would probably be so small that this elegant coupe – a smaller, far less ugly Ferrari FF or GTC4 Lusso – will probably remain a one-off that will leave a small band of would-be sports wagon buyers frustrated.
Hey, what’s new? BMW and the world’s other automakers have a track record of building, and sometimes showing us, cool concept two-door wagons and never putting them into production.
BMW Z1 Coupe
The 1989 BMW Z1 roadster was a wild departure for BMW, a plastic-bodied sports car with a pair of crazy drop-down doors. But what we didn’t know at the time is that BMW was working on other possible members of a Z1 family, including this Z1 Coupe.
Though the Z1 DNA is recognizable, not least due to those doors being carried over, the design is full of references to future 1990s BMWs, including the E38 7-Series at the front end, and the Z3 Clown Shoe at the back. And being a crossover, it now seems light years ahead of its time.
Porsche 928-4
Porsche toyed with a few additional 928 variants during the model’s long, near-20-year life, including a four-door version. But the nearest any of them got to production is when the automaker built a stretched (by 10 inches/25 cm) 928-4 (for four proper seats) wagon as a 75th birthday present for Ferry Porsche in 1984. A four-door 928 was also built three years later, but neither project went anywhere and we would have to wait until the Cayenne arrived in 2003 to buy a four-door Porsche from an official dealer.
Audi Shooting Brake
Two years before the 2007 second-gen TT landed Audi gave us a preview of what was coming in the form of 2005’s Audi Shooting Brake concept. The Tokyo Motor Show star’s front end and interior were almost identical to those of the road car that followed, but sadly Audi never gave us the option to buy a TT with the concept’s handsome squared-off tail. But maybe VW Group did, because Europe’s unfairly forgotten 2006 VW Scirocco bore more than a passing resemblance to the Shooting Brake.
Audi Allroad Shooting Brake
Related: Audi TT Final Edition Marks The Beginning Of The End
That’s right, Audi pulled the exact same trick when it came to warming us up for the Mk3 TT. But the 2014 show car wasn’t only a wagon, it was also a crossover and a plug-in hybrid, three things the production car introduced a few months never was. If it had been it might have met with more success and we wouldn’t have had to write the TT’s obit this year.
Pontiac Firebird Type K
GM had scrapped a plan to put wagon versions of the second-generation Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird into production at the dawn of the 1970s, but Pontiac wouldn’t let the idea go and unleashed the Firebird Type K (Kammback) concept in 1977. The show car swapped the earlier prototype’s conventional flip-up rear hatch for two centrally-hinged gullwing glass panels, and had its rear lights hidden beneath four horizontal bars stretching across the tail – a trick that would be picked up for later Firebirds.
Despite the car looking like a cross between a hearse and an iron lung, GM design legend Bill Mitchell was a big fan and pushed to productionize the Firebird with Pininfarina’s help. But ultimately the numbers didn’t stack up and with a third-gen F body slated for a 1982 launch, time was running out and the idea was axed. Some enterprising aftermarket outfits built their own, however, and even GM had one look at the idea in 1985 before dropping it once and for all.
Volvo Estate Concept
The two-door P1800ES wagon of the early 1970s is one of Volvo’s best-loved classics, and the company has riffed on the theme several times since. Most memorably there was the 480 coupe in the 1980s, but the rear end of the C30 that came 20 years later was also heavily inspired by the glass tailgate on the original ES, and Volvo mined the same design seam for the incredibly boring-sounding, but tidy-looking 2014 Estate Concept.
Unfortunately, on that occasion the two-door format was a red herring, as it was when Volvo revealed the Concept XC Coupe wagon crossover later that same year. Every production Volvo sedan, wagon and SUV that followed has had four doors.
Audi Avantissimo
Even 22 years ago, before hyper-expensive SUVs were really a thing, it was almost impossible to buy a wagon version of any European luxury car bigger than midsize without engaging the services of a coachbuilder. But for a while after Audi introduced the Avantissimo at the 2001 Frankfurt Motor Show it looked like that might change.
Audi never did make an A8 wagon available to the general public, but much of the technology visible on the Avantissimo, including the MMI infotainment interface, fingerprint scanner and adaptive headlights, was present on the 2003 A8 sedan.
Toyota GT86 Shooting Brake
Toyota’s global chief engineer Tetsuya Tada was so taken with a scale model of a hypothetical GT86 wagon built by Toyota Australia that he had it made into the full-size, fully drivable GT86 Shooting Brake. And this wasn’t your usual motor show lash-up that can’t do more than walking speed in case the doors fall off, but a genuine hoon-ready wagon.
As you’ve probably guessed, the Aussie 86 remained a one-off, though strictly speaking it wasn’t the first of the boxer sports cars to get a wagon conversion. Back in 2013, a year before Tada saw Toyota Australia’s scale model, Subaru revealed the Cross Sport Design Concept, a sporty, low-slung, two-door crossover that appeared to be based on its version of the GT86, the BRZ.
BMW E46 M3 Touring Concept
BMW started this story, so let’s bring it full circle with the E46 M3 Touring Concept. As with the Z1 Coupe, the hot E46 wagon was only officially revealed years after the fact, so we can’t accuse BMW of taunting us with something it was never going to deliver. And the truth is, it did want to put the M3 Touring into production, or at least some BMW execs and engineers did, but homologation and cost issues nixed the plan.
Related: New BMW M3 Touring Is Just Too Quick For The Audi RS4 Avant
The good news is that BMW did give the green light to a wagon version of the latest 503 hp (510 PS) G80 M3 Competition. Well, its good news unless you live in North America, where the G81 M3 Touring isn’t available. But, you know, maybe in another 20 years and three generations…