IS YOUR NEXT SPORTS CAR A YAMAHA?

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Would you buy a Yamaha automobile? You might already have since Yamaha provided the engines to the Toyota 2000GT, Ford Taurus SHO and Volvo XC90 V-8 (plus more components for Toyota, Lexus and Ford—not to mention a Formula 1 car). The question is, would you buy the Yamaha Sports Ride Concept car which was shown at the Tokyo Show.

The tuning fork on a car.

Plush leather in a carbon and aluminum cockpit. It is right-side drive for the Japanese market.

Yamaha’s two-seat coupe is the size of the Mazda Miata, but the Yamaha Sports Ride weighs 500 pounds less — only 1653 pounds. Using engineering from McLaren Formula 1 designer Gordon Murray on the chassis and aesthetic design by ex-Toyota designer Dezi Nagaya, the Sports Ride Concept has a carbon fiber monocoque around which the concept is built. This has been fabricated through the iStream Carbon patented process, where where two carbon skins sandwich a honeycomb core. This method is designed to reduce production times and costs to a fraction of what is today’s norm.

1991 Yamaha OX99 — 12-cylinders and 200 plus mph.

Yamaha build a sports car once before, but only three OX99s were built (a raw aluminum one, a black one and a red one). In 1991 Yamaha had plans to develop the OX99 as a production car (with an astounding $800,000 price), but when the Japanese economy entered a recession in the early 1990s the idea was dropped in 1994.

The Yamaha OX99’s 3.5 liter, V12 engine powered the Jordan team in the 1992 Formula 1 season. It was called the “Jordan 192” engine. Yamaha reportedly supplied the engine to Jordan for free after Jordan lost its Ford engine deal.