Yahoo Finance Bed, Track, and Beyond! Check Out This One-Off Honda Civic Type R Pickup
Honda has stepped up its performance game in the past couple of years, unleashing a wide range of driver-oriented machines. At the heart of this renaissance is the Civic lineup, which offers coupes, sedans, and hatchbacks with Sport, Si, and Type R variants. As is the case with most Honda products, these sporting machines also retain a good measure of practicality. Now Honda engineers have added another performance vehicle with an entirely different kind of practicality: a Civic Type R pickup.
Although this thing looks like it could be an April Fools’ Day joke or some sort of wacky fanboy SEMA creation, it is indeed a true Honda product. Just don’t expect it to see a full production run. Unveiled at the U.K.’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) Test Day, it was built by the group that runs the amateur racing team Synchro Motorsport. They’re part of the product engineering department at Honda’s U.K. manufacturing plant in Swindon, England.
Code-named Project P, the pickup started as a preproduction Civic Type R. The team reworked the exterior from the beltline up and from the B-pillar back. Inside, everything behind the front seats was removed, and in the resulting space is a bed lined with diamond-plate metal sheets. There’s also a new roll cage, in black, complete with two small light bars.
Instead of folding down as on a normal pickup truck, the rear tailgate swings up. Hilariously, the massive Type R wing is retained. And that’s what makes this concept so wild: It looks like a Type R that happens to have a bed instead of rear seats and a trunk.
Mechanically, the Type R pickup is essentially still a Type R. It uses the same suspension, the same gearbox, and the same turbo four that makes 306 horsepower and 295 lb-ft of torque. With an expected zero-to-62-mph time quicker than six seconds and a claimed top speed of faster than 165 mph, the team is contemplating tracking it.
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“We are even considering taking it to the Nürburgring to see if we can take the record for the fastest front-wheel-drive pickup truck,” project lead Alyn James said in a press release.
Now that’s a hotly contested record of the utmost importance. But importance is not the goal here; a fun way to express creativity is, and this Civic Type R pickup certainly accomplishes that.
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