Concept cars from the 1970s and the 1980s are, for me,
uniquely fascinating. There’s something exceptionally cool about those cars,
perhaps because they represent the unbridled imagination, hope and ambition of the
people who conceptualised and designed those cars. One of these is the Peugeot Quasar,
a 600bhp concept car, but first a bit of background. Back in 1984, Peugeot was
on a roll, having launched the brilliant 205 GTI hot hatch for the street and
running the mid-engined, four-wheel-drive 205 Turbo 16 in the Group B World
Rally championship. It was in this year itself that Peugeot engineers started
work on the Quasar prototype, a two-seater sedan with which the French company
wanted to go racing from 1987.
Assembled in the PSA plant in La Garenne and unveiled at the 1984 Paris Motor
Show, the Peugeot Quasar was ‘inspired’ by the astronomical phenomenon of the ‘Quasar,’
which according to Wikipedia is ‘an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus with
enormous radiant energy.’ Built on the same chassis as the Peugeot 205 Turbo 16
and with a 600-horsepower engine from the Group B rally car, the Quasar represented
cutting-edge automotive technology of the 1980s. Along with its space-age
styling, other notable bits on the Quasar included its scissor doors, which
were made of carbonfibre and Kevlar, interiors that featured hand-stitched red
leather and a digital instrument panel with a multimedia CRT screen.
With the demise of Group B rally cars in 1987, Peugeot (as well as other car manufacturers) had to cancel the development of many race/rally car projects and the Quasar was one of those; it never progressed beyond the prototype stage. Only a single example of the car was ever built, which today lives on in the Peugeot collection at the Musée de l'Aventure Peugeot in Sochaux, in France. The car looks pretty spectacular even today, and one wonders what might have been if the Quasar had actually made it to production.
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