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I’m sure this one counts as a warm hatch, rather than a hot one.
Trust me, it’s slower than it looks
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1987 Sampo Alisa Citi
With 80’s cars it’s a little bit hard to not just put some square lights on a square body and not do much else, there’s none of that earlier decades’ chrome smattering or the current times elaborate grille shapes and LED strip shaping that would raise the fixture count of your car.
This cheeky little hatchback was a challenge to myself to design an 80’s car with more fixtures and some unique Sampo touches familiar from other models. These include such details like the heated license plate cover on the trunklid (with visible hinges and heater lines) that also covers the reverse lights, the faux six headlight look consisting of (out to in) indicators, low beams and high beams or even the more-elaborate-than-dodge crosshair grille standard across Sampo’s range pre-00’s.
At this time, a large part of Sampo’s lineup was named after people. Taneli, Ahti, Karina or Alisa. Citi in the name refers to the trim level with the standard Sampo 1.8 SMF flat 4 with 80 horsepower going through a 5-speed manual box to the rear and smaller wheels. A 4x4 option with 14" wheels instead was also available with higher suspension, although the Citis suspension is also plenty enough for the nordic dirt roads.
I may be didn’t go that unique with the interior however, it has a pretty typical for Sampo brown and tweed interior upholstery with rather rudimentary equipment but I didn’t go that all out designing it, just as long as all surfaces were furnished.
I’m pretty happy with the result, and it was good practice to add a lot of small details that help older automation made cars look “real”, when modern cars can get away with less of those small touches when the design itself does all the work.
And here’s an edited line of text because I accidentally just posted this in the guess what car thread and it doesn’t let me just copy paste.
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By my reckoning, the Sampo Alisa is based on the 155-like body set (which has since been replaced by the '85 Juliet body sets) from the legacy body mod pack - but it looks modern enough to stay in production with a facelift or two well into the 1990s.
1971 Cavaliere Nobile Volcano
In the 50s and 60s, Cavaliere Nobile was a manufactor of expensive and exclusive sports cars and grand tourers. But in order to survive, some kind of… mass produced vehicle was needed.
The result was an engineer´s car, ignoring all conventions and surely unique. The small hatchback had a rear-mounted and flat boxer engine, allowing for two trunks, a giant one in the front and more space in the rear behind the, well, very cramped and loud rear seats.
The car was intended to compete with the Primus Publica III that dominated the frunian small sporty car market. With only 53 horsepower, the Volcano was definitely not a hot hatch, but a skilled driver could absolutely annoy cars of higher power and size.
The successor arrived in 1976 and was very conventional, abandoning that unique idea - but the drawbacks (terminal oversteer frightening unskilled drivers, high service cost for what it is, low rear seat comfort) were obvious. Sales wise, the Volcano was satisfying for the manufactor, especially considering how wild the engineering was. Since the successor Coboldo was built together with the very consverative Ariyan manufactor Yamaguchi, a small car of that sportiness wasn´t seen until the legendary Supermini arriving in 1983, and even that one had the usual FF layout.
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The all new ETR Charma 1992. Ready to be your pal. The perfect small city car.
The ETR Charma is the perfect city car! Economic, easy to use, agile and FUN!
The car comes in 3 trim levels. The car in the picture is the sporty top trim.
And comes with 4 engine options. 1.4 8V / 1.2 1.4 1.6 16V all NA petrol engines. (1.6 only comes with the sports trim)
Note: The car is in the city car (A) segment. Which is smaller than the subcompact (B).
The competitors of this car are: VW Lupo, Fiat Panda, Renault twingo and such.
I think I did a pretty ok job with this one. 
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Have a dumb, no fixture, rear engined rear wheel drive 5 door city car concept I remade that was originally gonna be the concept for the Iso Rivolta challenge, and now remade as a potental engineering base for QFC38 sans Techpool allocation. Because I suck at attempting to style anything newer than the 1980s
Dumb_Build_-_2014_RR_City_Car.car (14.6 KB)
1981-1984 Vulcan Ribolla HE
The first generation of the hatchback edition of Vulcan’s Ribolla. It has a 96ci inline-4 engine producing 96 horsepower, an automatic transmission, double-wishbone front suspension and solid axle leaf in the rear. This is the HE edition of the Ribolla, standing for Hatchback Edition. It was first introduced in 1981 and was in production until 1984, where it was replaced by the 2nd gen Ribolla. This specific version of the HE was only sold in Europe
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1996-2001 Tokis GlowStik
A Strangely named Japanese subcompact hatchback (remake of a car i made 2 years ago)
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@ketchup66
The different stylings on each body type all look really good! Very nice work and an inspirational design, imo.
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Here is something I have been working on, the 2009 production model of the earlier concept Van Zandt Avant. An eco-friendly and economical car built for the daily commute, the routine go-gets, and the occasional outing.
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2006 Yamaguchi Tesuryo
Beats walking.
Cheap and reliable.
Not too bad at cornering.
Everything you can expect from a car in this class and price range.
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2024 Tartan Tripoli (in 5-door guise here), your standard economy long hatch AKA Škoda Octavia rival.
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Ioniq 6 reimagined are the vibes I’m getting
1988-95 STRENUS SYLPHIDE
To start with, what is a STRENUS???
Well, some people may remember this thread:
The lack of brands on the “affordable, emotional” side made me think. There’s room for one. Also, I have thought a lot about how A&D survived some of the toughest times (mainly after WW2, 70s oil crisis and the waning relevance of small scale manufacturers in the 80s and 90s)…
Enter Strenus. It’s not really supposed to be a budget brand from A&D either. I think of it more like a cross ownership like the VW-Porsche relations in the older days, where I think Porsche was the largest shareholder in VW/VAG, and VW the largest shareholder in Porsche. Also, since there’s sort of part of the lore that A&D was in trouble by the 80s, I think I want to fuse them closer by then.
BUT… I have nothing but vague ideas (more or less the ones I am giving you) about the backstory which is one of the reasons why I don’t want an actual thread yet. The other one? Eh…
I kind of want to make V4 engines a thing of this brand, but until we get the small engine DLC, which seems to be far away still as I have understood it, there will be flat 4 engines in place for them. So, to not have to wipe and rewrite too much of the history, I don’t bother with starting too much of a thread just yet.
But anyway. The Sylphide was a rather typical late 80s C-segment car, and a descendant to the first Strenus, the 1953 Strenus 1100.
Semi quirky styling and some oddball engineering made it stand out from the crowd a bit, but it was still not too weird to be accepted by Mr. (or Mrs.?) Average. This is a 1.5 GL, kind of a mid range version, powered by a 1498 cc, 78 hp engine. The top of the range version? The HT4, a homologation special for rally, with almost three times that power output. But that’s a story for another time.
The Sylphide was only available with one body style, this 5 door hatchback, and was built relatively unchanged until 1995.
Even on the inside, it was obvious that Strenus tried to stand out from the crowd.
Playful upholstery patterns and digital instrumentation made the car feel a bit more than just your average 80s hatchback, despite acres of the typical dark plastics of the era.
The rear seat could be split and folded for maximum versatility, which probably was needed since the luggage compartment weren’t all that big. The headrests were designed to impair visibility as little as possible.
Well, there you had a little story about Strenus, and the Sylphide, and I hope it was enjoyable enough despite me not really knowing in detail what I should do with the brand just yet…
2 Likes