BMW Concept Touring Coupe revealed
Aussie BMW designer Calvin Luk puts a hard lid on his Z4 to create the Touring Coupe conceptBMW has debuted the Concept Touring Coupe as its star turn at the Villa d’Este Concorso d’Eleganza in Italy, but the latest work from its Australian designer Calvin Luk isn’t headed for production.
Effectively a BMW Z4 Shooting Brake, the Concept Touring Coupe is a one-off concept designed to highlight Italian interior craftsmanship and to build up false hopes in small coupe fans.
BMW has done this sort of thing before, with both the BMW Z3 Coupe, which arrived in 2002 in both standard and M forms, and the E86 Z4 Coupe from 2006.
The second-generation Z4 served double duty as a convertible and a coupe, with a folding hard-top roof, but the current G29 Z4 is a soft-top only.
BMW admits the design harks back to the 1940 Mille Miglia-winning 328 Touring Coupe, but it also has strong hints of the early 1970s 02 Touring models.
“The BMW Concept Touring Coupe celebrates the original Sheer Driving Pleasure,” BMW Design head Domagoj Dukec said.
“A highly emotional vehicle like this shows that the passion for everything that goes into driving pleasure has been essential through the ages and will be for the future.”
BMW carefully omits the badge ‘Z4’ from any of the Concept Touring Coupe material, but it’s clearly based on Luk’s first production convertible, down to sharing most of its front-end, its side sculpting and its inline six-cylinder turbo-petrol engine.
It deviates from the type straight away, though, with a unique grille, while its elongated roof is sculpted with a deep central groove, falling into a flat rear screen.
The look gives the car immensely strong-looking haunches, completing the design with a small lip spoiler across the middle of the new tailgate.
The side profile delivers a pronounced Hofmeister kink for the new rear side-window section, and it is surrounded by a silver-bronze strip that is immediately familiar and smacks of the BMW XM.
The interior is hand-made in Poltrona Frau leather, with a darker shade used at the top of the dash to make driving easier, while a lighter saddle-leather is used on the bottom half to add warmth to the cabin.
The new luggage area is large enough to swallow custom-made Schedoni leather luggage, including two large bags, a weekender bag and a garment bag, all held in place with leather straps in a beautifully sculpted rear section.
The Touring Coupe runs on unique 20-inch front alloys and 21-inch version at the back, and it is coated in unique Sparkling Lario paintwork, complete with embedded blue-glass flecks.
Related: BMW’s Lukiest designer
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