Italdesign Machimoto
Weird Car of the Day #464: 1986 Italdesign Machimoto – Fever team
Where do I start?
Visually, the Italdesign Machimoto is a convertible sports car.
With up to nine seats.
Six of the seats are nigh-identical to those you'd find on a motorcycle. Or jet ski.
Does Machimoto have anything going for it?
Well, I suppose this would be a useful camera car, considering its flexible interior layout and up to nine options for where to sit.
And it'd be fun to sit in while learning a new race track—racing schools could probably house a few for apex adjacent instruction.
Design exists to push cars forward. It's a discipline that allows someone to translate thoughts and observations into reality. Why not this? Why not that?
Whether the work of a committee or individual, a vehicle is the physical result of a number of decisions. That's it.
So, then, what gets me about the Italdesign Machimoto (a blend of the Italian words for car and motorcycle): the crazy bastards actually set out to make a six person roadster, with nine seats. More on this in a minute because it's confusing.
When you frame it that way, Machimoto is, for me at least, much easier to digest.
In a design sense, what would make the best multi-person convertible sports car, anyway?
First, you'd want a nimble, fun, and predictable chassis that gives brisk performance but isn't too fast. Machimoto's chassis came from the Mk2 Volkswagen Golf GTI, a platform noteworthy for providing legendary hot hatch handling. (And if you think the Machimoto looks familiar, you're probably thinking of the Italdesign Orbit, this car's boring-by-comparison step-sibling.)
michael banovsky
