Remember the post about car designer Harry Bentley Bradley’s, uh, eccentric Infiniti J30? While Bradley was mainly known for designing hot rod and custom American cars and many early Hot Wheels castings, he also worked for a number of car magazines. One of them (sorry, the title was lost to time; if anyone recognizes this image please let us know) commissioned Bradley to sketch some of the cars that were shown at the Osaka Motor Show in 1981. The Toyota Soarer, mistranslated as “Sourer” was described as a Mercedes-Benz competitor, and at the time it was thought that the Nissan Leopard might come to the US.
Bradley was a talented artist, as you can see in these sketches. He also left a legacy of students from his time as a teacher at the Art Center College of Design, as seen in the comments on his Infiniti post. Someone really needs to save that car!
I remember reading an article about these 3 cars.
http://soarercentral.com/sc-forum/messages/9192/362582.html?1341058776
The nose treatment of that Leopard looks more like a Fox-body Ford LTD than an actual Leopard.
Wow… I mean that F30 Leopard is pretty spot on.
The Leopard eventually came to the US as the Infiniti M30.
Toyota did bring a MZ20 Soarer to the US to gauge dealer interest, but it didn’t really impress them so that’s when Toyota went radical and came out with the JZZ30/UZZ30 Lexus SC 300/400.
No toyota did not. They just considered it, but it was already few years in its production so they waited.