I enjoyed reading about Storm Automotive. And I agree on your point about engine families, that’s part of why I haven’t created my company’s origin story yet. I really liked your 50s to 70s designs too. Keep up the great work! 
The automotive industry marches ever onward, and technology has pushed engine horsepower limits ever higher. Technology has also provided a few answers to how to get that power down to the ground.
Now, to start with, the Storm Duke was mostly meant, originally, to be a comfortable and rather tame family cruiser. Five seats, comfortable interior, cassette player, huge amount of cargo space, everything you could want in a wagon. But, the gearheads in the engine department wanted nothing to do with tame. They’d just discovered ball bearing turbochargers and multi-point electronic fuel injection. They talked to the drivetrain department, who figured out something from the Ascender light-duty 4x4 truck, as well as a solution to the roughness of the auto-locker rear differentials. They both told the interior team that the seats may need a little extra padding to the buckets to hold the driver and front seat passenger in their seat.
The end result was an all-wheel-drive, twin-turbocharged 6 liter V8-powered monster. With geared limited slip differentials front, center, and rear, power made it to the pavement through all four of the 215mm wide tires. This wagon has 758 reasons to be pulled over and arrested, and all of them are hiding under your right foot. With a 0-60 time of 6.2 seconds and a top speed of 172.8 miles per hour, we considered, just for a moment, that maybe we shouldn’t release this to the public. Then we all remembered that horsepower sells, and something this crazy, this violent, would sell rather well. Sure, the 13.93 second quarter mile time isn’t as fast as some other cars out there, but no one would look twice at a simple station wagon until after it’s blown the doors off of their car.
Of course, this strategy would pay off, but we had to consider this technological leap wisely from now on. While it could be hilarious to make super-high-powered cars, it wouldn’t be a sustainable market. One of two things typically happens if you do that: Either you end up selling to a customer base who won’t use it for what it was built for, or you end up killing all of your customers in horrific speed-induced accidents. We’d need to consider our new technologies wisely, perhaps… geared toward safety?
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With AWD being something we now understood, it was time to test the market, a hard test between two great cars, identical in every way, except one difference. One car would be RWD, like everyone expected, and the other would be AWD.
The design teams talked for almost a week about what kind of car it should be. The body team wanted to do a big four-door car, the engine team wanted to try something new for a change, the suspension and chassis team were content to do another unibody with double wishbones, our interior team wanted to do something comfortable, and our lawyers were mentioning that we should seriously consider something with “less than 300 horsepower” to “keep the insurance companies happy.”
So the naming board got to work throwing darts at a bunch of bits of paper stuck on a poster of a car from some small Japanese car company and landed the name Sentinel.
About a week later, the engine team called a meeting (rather unusual for them) and unveiled what they’d been working on.
Once the shock of the meeting wore off (usually, an Engine Team ‘meeting’ was mostly “let’s go chat by the water cooler” and nothing serious like this), we looked over the new engine. With six pistons, a turbocharger, and multi-point fuel injection, it looked simply stunning. The power sheets were set down neatly on top of the blue-painted valve covers, and the figures were impressive, though not shocking. 280 horsepower, which made the lawyers happy. The body team seemed happy, because the engine would fit, though it was a little bit of a squeeze. The suspension team seemed okay with it, as the weight wasn’t that much. The interior team was indifferent, having already planned to put a luxury interior in whatever was built.
A long while later, the two cars were built, though there were two differences instead of the planned one. When asked about it, the Drivetrain team simply mentioned, “We tried to kill some of the wheel spin in the RWD model with a geared limited slip. The AWD one doesn’t have that problem, so we left it with open diffs.”
The two cars sat next to one another, and we all spent time picking at every little detail. Eventually, we all agreed to just test drive the damn things and quit staring at them. The automatic transmissions were flawless, smoothly picking through their four speeds to find just the perfect gear for the situation. The Hydropneumatic suspension ate up the bumps (and we majorly owe Pharte for their technology on that front) and the soft seats made it quite comfortable to drive around.
After putting about four-thousand miles on each car, each of us came to our own conclusions on which car we liked more. We handed both cars over to the test drivers, and they came back with a set of arbitrary numbers detailing what they liked about the cars.
Both cars sold rather well. More AWD models were sold, though the results were a bit skewed because someone put a geared limited slip diff in the RWD model, making it more expensive than the AWD one.
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I just read through this thread again after we did the transmission deal and I must say I like your cars. Also I’m flattered that my “crazy stuff” Patriot cars
inspired you 
Nice to see another muscle car -style manufacturer here. And usefully one that has some sanity applied! We at Patriot are always striving
for the ultimate craziness so we are happy to see someone hasn’t completely lost it! This way we can preserve 'Murican muscle for a wider audience!
Founder John Storm has left the company in the hands of Jim Shade, former head of the Engine Design Team.
With increased pressure by insurance companies to back off on the horsepower wars, and with gas prices on the rise, something needed to be done. People were looking for cheap cars that were fuel efficient, and many flocked to Japanese hatchbacks, leaving American land yachts in the past.
Storm Automotive, needing to innovate or die, created the Storm Breeze. A car, hatch, and two-door wagon all based off of the same base platform. With all three cars sharing as many parts as possible, the hope was that this easy-to-drive transversely-mounted FWD platform would sell well.
Dealing with the issues of the transverse layout proved difficult at first. Offering little room to work with, the engine needed to be compact, yet had to produce enough power to out-shine the Japanese hatchbacks. A V6 was chosen, mostly because a four-cylinder of reasonable displacement just wouldn’t fit. At 2.4 liters, and constructed with an aluminum block and head, this DOHC 4-valve setup was tuned first to make the 139 horsepower needed to be competitive against cars of similar size. Keeping fuel efficiency up was the most important thing, knowing people were looking really hard at that number.
All three base designs came in all three major trims, offering nine total variants. All variants could hold 5 people, though only the wagon held the claim of “holding 5 adults in comfort” among the three versions.
Between the three trims, there were a few small differences. GL offered a standard vinyl interior and only provisions for 8-track tapes, a standard 5-speed stick with 5th gear being overdrive, and was the cheapest available trim. LX offered luxurious leather seats, a top-of-the-line cassette player, a four-speed automatic (with 4th gear overdrive), and digital gauges. GT offered premium cloth seats and a cassette player, replaced the rear bumper and exhaust system to have two tips, swapped in some sportier suspension, installed a geared limited slip differential in the transmission, equipped bigger rims and sportier tires, added larger brake discs, and had a different final drive ratio, offering no overdrive gear, as well as getting the more powerful V6 engine.
With the GT trim, it was decided that the mere 139 horsepower wouldn’t be enough to impress. Other car companies settled for GT being just a ground effects package, with bigger wheels and stiffer suspension and a factory-applied body kit. We wanted to increase power, but not too much. Turbocharging was considered, and a test car was made with nearly 240 horsepower worth of twin-turbocharged V6. After the test driver crashed the prototype due to a new phenomenon he called “Torque Steer,” it was decided that turbos and FWD wouldn’t be exactly compatible. A redesign was called on the engine, and 183 horsepower was carefully coaxed out of the V6 naturally.
The Breeze sold better than expected, though not as strongly as some other, more overpowered models. We’d need to do something about that in the future, though we’d bought ourselves some time to settle in and get comfortable.
1985
A lot of things happened in this year. Gas prices had started to settle. Cars started looking more aerodynamic. Rock and Roll was born. And a movie about a time-traveling car showed in theaters.
Naturally, our designers looked to the future for inspiration. A sleek, aerodynamic car with an interior out of those sci-fi movies, and an exterior like nothing else, was quickly sketched on the workroom table.
While the car would have to be tempered in power to appease the insurance companies and the lawyers, the Engine team demanded the ability to do a turbo V8. The limit was set at “No more than 400” horsepower.
The interior team insisted they’d need to do a luxury interior with a sci-fi twist, and we saw no problems with that. They quickly left the room to go sketch the interior plan for a car we hadn’t built yet.
The Body Design team decided that the car would need to be sleek and aerodynamic, but still carry a high roofline so that rear-seat passengers, even fully grown adults, wouldn’t hit the roof on every bump. They wanted to do T-Tops on the car, and had come up with an idea to store them in the trunk lid, so they weren’t ever going to be lost, and you had them in the event of poor weather, or just wanting to close up the top.
So, with the ideas in mind, all the teams went to work and built a car from the future, today.
When we’d first seen it, jaws hit the floor. It looked like a small spacecraft had landed in the design room of our shop, with it’s sharp lines at the back and aerodynamic front end. The first thing we all noticed was the large pop-up headlights, which contained both the high-beam and low-beam lamps side by side. For safety purposes, they had a mirrored reflection port underneath, allowing the light to still be useful in the event that the light buckets failed to deploy, or as a feature of the high-speed aerodynamics package.
The color was a vivid electric blue, something that we’d never seen before on any car. The closest thing we’d had any experience with was either a powder blue or robin’s egg blue, but this was an electric blue surprise.
So, when it came time to name the car, a list of suggestions was made, and all of them were voted out, except for Xenon. An electric blue car, named after an elemental gas that glows when electrical current is passed through it.
Inside the car, we found little of the electric blue, save for a bit of light-blue stitching on the black leather seats. A surprise to all of us was the fact that the gauge cluster was completely blacked out, almost impossible to make anything out. Then the car was started for the first time, and the gauge cluster burst to life, with a quick process of starting all the essential systems, each of which was noted with a small, simple “System Nominal” at the end. Pressing the Start button caused a small delay as more bursts of information lit up.
“Fuel pump… Priming… Ready”
“Oil Pump… Energizing… Operational”
“Cooling Fan… Active”
“Starter Energized”
Suddenly the quiet hum of a V8 filled the shop floor. The display which had once been reading out what the car was doing was now alive with information. Oil pressure, fuel tank in both percentage and weight of fuel remaining, engine RPM, oil temperature, coolant temperature, battery voltage, everything you’d normally just have another gauge for, was displayed in red numbers on the panel.
Next to the gauges was a top-of-the-line luxury-grade cassette player, with a sliding tray that had all of the audio controls neatly hidden away unless you needed them. The ashtray was flush-fit to the dash and deployed smoothly with a push of a button, and upon deployment, offered an additional button to begin heating the cigarette lighter. The transmission was a five-speed stick, although a good quality one, and just behind it was the center console. At first, I thought there were no cupholders, until it was pointed out that the two barely-visible circles were the cupholders. By pushing one down, it created a cupholder that wasn’t there a moment ago. To get it back, you just pushed a small button and it popped back up on a spring.
Naturally, the engine team wanted to brag about their small all-aluminum V8, making 355 horsepower. They mentioned that they’d tried to optimize the turbos so that they spooled slower, meaning that under less aggressive driving conditions, the engine wasn’t making as much power, but under higher throttle conditions, you’d unleash the raw fury of 3.4 liters of V8 engine. Amazing how they managed to spin turbo lag as a good thing.
In the end, the Xenon sold well, although was fairly criticized for its looks, being a bit too bold or too aggressive for some people, and others just didn’t like the pop-up headlights. That’s fair enough, honestly, as no one likes every car that comes along.
(Yes, this is the same Xenon I had built for the Car Shopping Round, specifically here. It was actually intended to be here, but its original stats had to be changed to fit the round, and, well, it still fits in with the “We’re trying not to make too much horsepower, but speed sells” crowd in Storm Automotive’s workforce right now.)
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I love the story and the car. I imagine it can also say stuff like “warning, not enough fuel” in a robotic voice, like this when you turn it off https://www.freesound.org/people/qubodup/sounds/219567/
Pretty much the idea. A good list of warnings it could give would be things that typically had gauges (this car still has gauges, just not in the traditional sense) or things that eventually earned an idiot light.
So things like “Caution: Fuel Depleted. Reserve Tank Active.” or “Warning: Oil Pressure is Low. Stop Immediately.” could both be read out on the display as well as spoken, to further notify the driver of bad things happening.
And yes, there would be a switch to disable the voice, and also, there would be a proper shutdown sequence for the car. Even though all you’re doing is hitting the stop button, it’d shut the engine down, halt the fuel pump, then shut off the electrically-driven oil pump, and finally disengage the cooling fans. And yes, it would tell you it’s doing these things, because that is what cars of the future would do, at least from the views of the mid 80’s.
And there would likely be a bit of infamy gained from getting in a crash, having the air bags go off, and having to put up with, “Alert: You have been in an accident. Please seek medical attention.”
Plus, Aerodynamic Mode sounds cool until you realize probably half the states would have required it to be disabled, as running with the lights closed on purpose (even though they’re redirected through the lower lens) and your mirrors folded in at speed would be considered ‘dangerous.’ And rightly so, given the mirrors situation. As for whether it improved the Xenon’s fuel efficiency, the answer, quite simply, is no. Or at least, not enough to be concerned with.
And no, there’s no true reserve tank, although there wasn’t a true reserve in the old Volkswagen Beetle, either. This one just has it computer controlled and servo activated to keep the fuel going and let you have an additional 3 gallons to find a gas station.
1986
Storm Automotive’s quest for fun with less than 400 horsepower continues, along with a quest to find something to do with the Engine Team’s I6.
“We can’t just let that engine design sit around forever. We paid good money developing it, and we’ve just been letting it sit around.”
“Let’s put it in another luxury car. It makes sense, and it might be just the right time.”
The Storm Turbo Pilot was unleashed on the public. With 300 horsepower of turbocharged inline fury, originally developed for the Sentinel, and AWD with a four-speed automatic, it proved to be a luxury car with a hint of fun-to-drive factor, if one actually chose to get into it. Rumor has it that there was consideration for making a rally version, being built for Group B. Sadly, that never came to be.
With comfort taken care of for the time being, the Engineers focused on having a little fun. What do you get when you put three design teams in one room, with copious amounts of alcohol and a less-than-healthy dose of Mythology?
The Storm Medusa.
260 horsepower of twin-turbocharged V6 mayhem, sitting behind all 5 seats, turning just the rear wheels in an unusual twist of fate. Originally designed as a joke, a number of the test drivers ran the concept car around the testing track and found it to be so much fun they demanded versions for themselves.
Sadly, the Medusa was doomed from the start. Like previous rear-engined cars before it, people just didn’t understand that if the back end stepped out, there was likely to be a dramatic bit of oversteer, and while Storm Automotive had built the car to have a fair bit of understeer in it, replacing either the 140mm front tires or the 215mm rears could dramatically change the handling characteristics. While Storm managed to avoid the controversy of a certain other American car manufacturer from a while back, it still inevitably picked up a reputation for being “twitchy, hard to drive, and a nightmare when the roads are wet or covered in snow.”
Some people still found it funny to show up in a seemingly-normal 4 door sedan to pick a friend up for vacation, however, and watch them complain about opening the ‘trunk’ to find a great big snarling engine in there, and among American driving purists, young teenagers, and people having a midlife crisis with a family, the Medusa found a bit of a niche market. While it never sold particularly well, it did break even on R&D costs for the 3 liter V6.
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1987
A bit of a rough year for Storm Automotive, 1987 brought with it a number of design changes, some forced on the company by the company’s own lawyers, who had been given inches and decided to take miles. This year, they enforced a strict maximum horsepower on Storm Automotive, forcing every car they’d sell in 1987 to have less than 200 horsepower.
Half the engine team quit overnight. Those who remained were outraged at the demanded specifications for their next car. Four cylinders, no turbocharger, less than 2 liters displacement, and FWD.
But, those remaining in the engine team did their job, building the engine for, as they called it, “The world’s most miserable shitbox.”
An all-aluminum block and head were chosen, trying to decrease the weight of all of the components involved in the process to create the engine. To reduce the likelyhood of people actually modifying the engine to produce power, they were instructed to install a cast iron crank, despite the high weight. I-Beam steel connecting rods and Forged pistons soon followed the crank into the block, trying to counter the weight of the stupidly heavy iron crankshaft.
Having to run on regular unleaded gasoline, the compression ratio was 8.0:1, with a very low cam profile mandated by the lawyers, again causing problems. Multi-point EFI helped save the engine, even with just the single throttle body being allowed, as it allowed for a better fuel delivery, making the absurd 15.0:1 fueling ratio possible. A performance intake and highly-advanced ignition timing made up for the stupidity a little bit, although the requirement to have two cheap baffled mufflers and nothing more expensive than a basic tubular exhaust header seriously dampened power.
The result?
Inevitably, it had to go in a car, even though no one wanted to touch that engine with someone else’s 10-foot pole, and so it was agreed that they’d all work on the car to make it at least do one thing right.
The Storm Excel’s creation wasn’t something anyone looked forward to, but it was a car they had to make.
A corrosion-resistant steel unibody made up the body shell of the car, skinned in aluminum body panels, and settled on double-wishbone suspension, front and rear. The little engine was bolted up to a 5 speed stick with a viscous limited slip to ensure even power delivery. Hard tires were chosen, a decent long-life road tire being a recommended thing. 16 inch alloy rims held 175mm wide tires, both front and rear. To save weight, instead of a traditional spare tire, a tire-patch-kit was included in the trunk, along with instructions on how to use it. Solid discs and 2 piston calipers helped drag the front of the car down, while drum brakes settled out back, and despite this arrangement, no brake fade was ever noticed. Underneath the car, a full belly-tray covered everything, with just two little access holes for draining the oil from the gearbox and from the engine.
The interior team focused on making everything dull and gray, yet pleasant enough for an inexpensive car. The seats were high-quality cloth instead of leather, but managed to pull off the higher-class premium feel, as did the premium-grade cassette deck. Power Steering and Anti-lock brakes were standard, making the car very easy to drive. Safety was pretty standard for a late 80’s car, including a solitary driver’s side airbag designed to help the seatbelt restrain the driver in the event of a serious accident.
The paint colors were normally fairly mundane, but one color exclusive to the Storm Excel, never used in another Storm vehicle, was the never-named shade of purple seen on this example.
The Excel didn’t sell all that well initially, until word started to spread about the ‘insane’ gas mileage you could get. Sales inevitably picked up a little, although nowhere near as grand as previous cars had been.
As for Storm Automotive’s lawyers? They got the sack after this incident. It was decided unanimously through the company that even though the insurance companies wanted less powerful cars to be produced, if someone wrecked the car, the company was not liable so long as they built safe, dependable cars for the general public alongside the high-speed road monsters that people couldn’t get enough of.
The engine team eventually came back together once the news was spread that the horror was over with. As for the company, they accepted that if a car’s really that bad, it should be the new company car, and so 10 of them in the new shade of purple were kept as company cars.
Rumor has it one still exists in the modern age as a company car, although rarely ever driven with good reason…
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1988
Breaking into the van market was something we hadn’t done since the failed Trooper project, but we believed this time we could do it right. We decided, rather than making another god-awful passenger van no one wanted, we’d start with a cargo van, and a big one.
The Courier XL was designed around everyone’s need for a bigger bloody van. Our aged 6 liter V8 was chosen for reliability, putting out 355 horsepower, fed into a 4 speed automatic with an overdrive gear.
Concerns about safety led to our engineers putting extra lights in the CargoMax roof riser, duplicating the typical tail-lights up high to allow other drivers to see what the van driver was doing. One of the designers mockingly called it “air traffic control” and the name stuck.
Managing 13 MPG while being comfortable enough for three crewmen to get from job-site to job-site meant we sold a good number of these as fleet vans. A few smaller shipping companies bought a large number of these vans, and at least two notable examples were converted into ambulances.
Eventually, we knew we’d have to make a smaller version, and probably wouldn’t hurt to have a passenger van, but those were just design scribbles on the board for some other year.
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1989
We weren’t the first into the Minivan Market, but we did bring a few interesting features along when we introduced the Overland to the world. Designed as a luxury minivan, we decided that we’d use technology learned from our Courier line of vans, regarding the sliding rear doors. An experiment led to us building the Overland with sliding front doors as well, something which led to many of these vans being used as company cars, mandated on those who were notorious for dinging doors on more expensive cars.
Using the same base engine as the Medusa, just without turbochargers, the Overland was gifted with 200+ horsepower through our simple and effective AWD system. A simple 4-speed automatic made driving really, really easy, and the interior was set up with luxury grade materials and seating for 8 people.
While some criticized the van for looking like an overgrown hand-held vacuum cleaner, others praised it for the unique sliding front doors, the comfortable seating arrangement, and the not-altogether-terrible gas mileage for a huge van. With fold-flat third row seating, and optionally removable mid-row seating, there was enough room for any cargo you wanted to move, though the suspension wasn’t really built for large quantities of weight.
At the same time, the Courier’s two alternative versions showed up.
The Workmann traded AWD for being cheaper, still carrying 3 tradesmen into the job site.
The simpler-named GL trim was built for passengers, and could carry 9 people with ease. It was also RWD, like the Workmann, but not to keep costs down, more to share parts with the Workmann trim line. With three bench seats, it was simple and effective at carrying people in the premium-grade interior.
With two passenger vans in the market, Storm Automotive looked to the future, wondering what the 90’s would hold in store for the company.
i think your styling is very on point for the 80’s 
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I actually took inspiration from a lot of the 80’s cars for this period. Plain, simple, boxy, not much to look at, but they get you where you need to go.
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1990
The Envy Turbo Coupe from 1975 was a good car, but held back by technological limitations of the era. No AWD, crappy catalytic converters, and journal bearings in the turbochargers all held it back. While the Mechanical Fuel Injection system worked well enough, it was stupidly expensive and had been found to be a little on the unreliable side after a few years.
But, the 90’s were a perfect time to change those things. We’d improved our AWD technology over the years, and finally had a suitably-90’s name for it. SymTrak, as a result of our 50:50 drive split, symmetrical between front and rear wheels. With viscous limited slip differentials front, center, and rear, it gave the new Envy Turbo Coupe enough grip to launch the heavier, bigger car easily.
We chose to use the same base engine, our 6 liter V8, using our more modern Multi-Point EFI, and twin ball-bearing turbochargers to make the most of the engine. At the same time, it showed how well-tuned the original engine was, as the modern engine makes just a little more power than the old 1975 version, despite all the new tech hiding inside. This, more than anything, told us the old cast iron 70’s vintage engine had finally outlived the usefulness in our lineup. While we would continue producing the engine for many, many more years as a crate engine, the Envy was to be the last production car we’d use that engine in.
We kept the 2+2 layout and upgraded to an all-premium interior, though chose to produce the Envy with all corrosion-resistant steel on the exterior. While we had aluminum presses and full capabilities to manufacture in aluminum, steel was used due to the better safety it would inevitably offer in a crash. Given that we packed 532 horsepower into this car, we felt it’d be rather a bad decision to make another “Poison Green Coffin.” The pop-up headlights were dropped in favor of large, flush-mounted headlight buckets, improving aerodynamics with the lights on, while the close-tucked mirrors reduced wind drag. Despite actually making more power, the Mk2 actually got marginally better mileage than the 1975 Envy.
The revived Envy Turbo Coupe sold surprisingly well, catering to every guy who wanted to win the stop-light drag race, or take it to a drag strip. Sure, it wasn’t supercharged, but the scream of twin turbos was a sound that quickly became feared with the 4.5 second 0-60 times, and the stock 12.7 quarter mile, easily exceeding that if modified. With a top speed of 193.8 miles per hour, the Envy quickly became a strong car-of-choice for any V8 muscle enthusiast, despite the AWD system.
In fact, some people actually started preferring the SymTrak AWD for their daily-dose of fun. This was a muscle car that could tear off from the light with only a few feeble chirps of protest from the tires, blister down the track at high speed, and win races before some cars could get power to the ground.
While the insurance companies made sure that no mere teenager could ever afford to drive an Envy Turbo Coupe, it made itself the bedroom-poster car of many American teenagers, as well as that perfect “I’m 27 years old and I need something fun” second car.
Plus, the inevitable handful of high-speed accidents did keep doctors busy patching up crazy fools who thought the street was their race track, only to encounter a rush-hour traffic jam going way-too-fast. However, it did prove that the decision to use steel in the car’s construction was the right move, as it was the doctors, not the coroners, who were busy with Envy Fever.
Being the last production car to have the old version of the 6 liter V8, the surviving cars became highly collectible.
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1990 - Part 2
New ideas, old names. With SymTrak being a success, and the powerful V6 engine from the Overland and the Medusa proving to be very popular, it was time to bring a concept back to life, with a new idea, a new plan.
The Gunslinger was assembled with a corrosion-resistant steel monocoque chassis for safety, as we aimed to do something we’d done just twice before, once in a concept, and once in a production vehicle: putting the engine behind the seats.
The Gunslinger had an aluminum skin, which would have resulted in a poor safety rating under normal circumstances. However, our new Storm SafeT program meant we were going to put better safety systems in our faster cars. With Advanced safety features like airbags for both passenger and driver, side-curtain air bags, and an integrated safety rollover cage built into the chassis, the Gunslinger aimed to be a safe and fun mid-engine sports car.
A lightly-modified SymTrak system was fitted to the longitudinally-mounted V6 engine. Having AWD made the V6-powered mid-engine sports-car easy to drive, as did having Traction Control. Like all mid-engine cars, the Gunslinger does tend toward a hint of oversteer, but remains controllable due to traction control and adaptive dampers.
With a sporty interior, premium-grade cassette tape deck, and an array of bold, bright colors to choose from, the Storm Gunslinger sold well to those wanting an inexpensive mid-engine sports car. Insurance companies grew to hate the Gunslinger, as the inexpensive M-AWD platform let more young drivers experience the fun of going really-damn-fast. The Gunslinger’s 154 MPH top speed meant there was a lot of get-up-and-go, and some people inevitably put it to the test.
The Gunslinger sold for less than $20,000 when it was brand new. After a few years, the inexpensive sports car found its way into the hands of lots of younger drivers, who promptly put the safety systems to the ultimate test. They passed the test, although there were three casualties, and those three involved speeds recorded on the onboard data recorders exceeding 120 MPH, speeds that weren’t tested for head-on collisions with other cars.
Jim Shade, CEO and President of the Company, had this to say about the fatal accidents:
“We did all that we could to save lives in this car. The data recorders run until the airbags deploy, in a continuous loop for 30 minutes. All three fatalities had one thing in common: The driver wasn’t wearing their seatbelt. All the safety systems in the world won’t save someone who won’t take the 10 seconds to save themselves. Yes, we could put more airbags in the car, we could put ignition lockouts on the seatbelts, and we could redesign the windshield to be more resistant to impacts, but the results would still be the same. We tried. We can’t make people wear safety belts. The Xenon had ignition lockout on the driver’s seatbelt. The number of cars that went through a service center and had the driver’s side seatbelt buckled, stuffed into the seat padding, was astronomical. We attempted it again in the Turbo Pilot, except requiring relatching between ignition cycles, and yet still there were ‘No-Seatbelt’ casualties. Until the Law makes people wear their seatbelts, there will be fatal car accidents that we cannot prevent. That is the unfortunate and ugly truth.”
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Now this is a real NSX rival, but with a longitudinally mounted engine and AWD. The Envy Turbo Coupe, on the other hand, is a grand tourer, so why does it look like a Le Mans GT1 racer with its huge wing? You could have used the smaller wing from @Corvette6317 in its place and still provided the same level of downforce. Still, I am sure that both cars were the cream of the crop back then, and are still a wonderful drive today.
The Envy Turbo Coupe wears the same wing as it’s 70’s vintage counterpart, which would have had plenty of use on the track. Consider the 70’s vintage one the homologation version, wing and all.
As for being a rival to anything, the Gunslinger isn’t all that powerful.
Oh, and do consider this: Look at the dates the cars were posted in comparison to when the new wing came out. It didn’t exist for the first one, and while it may have existed for the second one, I wasn’t going to use it, instead going for similar looks. Go ahead, look at both cars, you’ll see a lot of similar features. Some of us like to keep a similar look between cars named the same.
1994
After several years of model refreshes, Storm Automotive revealed a new idea they’d been working on. Attempting to break into a market that had slowly started to develop, the sports-truck, they took an engine that’d been shelved 10 years earlier and dropped it into a unibody truck chassis, then let the Engine Design Team go crazy with it.
The Storm Jackal used a V6 made back in 1984 as the base, an engine that had been developed as competition against V8’s of the same time, but was shelved when Jim Shade took over. With the insurance companies and lawyers being told exactly where they could put all that paperwork, horsepower was back on the table, in large quantities.
Fitted with SymTrak AWD, the Jackal still tried to rip the tires off of the rims, mostly due to the 557 horsepower supplied by the twin-turbocharged V6. The Jackal was never intended to be a proper and solid truck, instead being designed strictly as the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing. It looked like a truck from all angles except the front, further increasing the stealth factor.
At the front, the water-to-air intercooler partially stuck through the plastic safety bumper, allowing the intercooler’s rather prominent radiator to have access to ice cold air moving at high speed. Many criticized the decision to place the intercooler in such a precarious location, placing it at risk of being damaged by parking dividers, curbs, and minor accidents.
When questioned about the lack of the advanced safety features found in the Gunslinger, the use of aluminum body panels instead of steel, and the horrifyingly bad gas mileage, Jim Shade had this to say:
“The public has spoken. They don’t appreciate all the extra safety equipment we placed in the Gunslinger and the updated Envy. The Jackal has all it needs, provided you use common sense, wear your seat belt, and drive the speed limit on public roads. If you want to go fast, take it to a track. As for the gas mileage, here’s a good thought experiment. You can have good gas mileage. You can have a lot of power. You can have an inexpensive car. Pick two. We’ll be selling the Jackal on dealership lots for $24,000. Consider that price and the 153 MPH top speed, the 500 horsepower V6, and the premium seats for five when you try to figure out which two we chose.”
(Note: The version that would have been sold would not have the intercooler piping sticking through the bumper and front of the truck. That would have been routed internally out of the way, leaving just the intercooler and the liquid-cooling unit outside the truck.)
The Jackal quickly became popular, although with the wrong crowds entirely. Being inexpensive, the Jackal was favored by young hooligans with too much money and not enough brains, who beat the crap out of the truck, then sold it once the engine started developing expensive problems. They were bought secondhand by hooligans who didn’t have that much money, and were still short on brains, who beat the crap out of what was left of the truck and sold it when they encountered the engine’s critical design flaw: Turbocharger bearing failures. The truck, at that point nearing 7 years old, encountered the final group of hooligans, who had just seen a movie in theaters about street racing, undercover cops, and crazy modifications. With aftermarket parts being readily available, and a Fast and Furious movie as inspiration, these hooligans took the truck to new, scary power levels, then raced them through city streets in highly illegal drag races.
Most of these trucks ended up looking like this shortly before either being dragged off to an impound lot, or being wrapped around a tree.
Unfortunately, finding a Storm Jackal in unmodified, working condition is nearly impossible. A few examples surely exist, but their owners would be rather reluctant to part with them, having seen what typically happens.
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This is an insane sports truck, reminiscent of the GMC Syclone but much crazier. Who in their right mind would put what is essentially an R35 GT-R drivetrain into a truck? Nobody would, but I’m glad you did!