Yes, the Yamaha Sports Ride concept car is actually going into production

The Yamaha Sports Ride concept stole some of Mazda’s RX-Vision rotary sports coupe’s thunder at the Tokyo Motor Show last month, and with good reason too. The follow-up to the MOTIV.e concept, albeit in a whole different mould, the Sports Ride is a two-seater sports concept designed to “offer a driver-machine relationship similar to a motorcycle.”

Like the MOTIV.e, the Sports Ride concept was also created with the help of legendary F1 mastermind Gordon Murray, also the man almost single-handedly responsible for the peerless McLaren F1. Although Murray is not behind the car's design, which was led by ex-Toyota designer Dezi Nagaya, the Sports Ride employs a new manufacturing system derived from Gordon Murray Design’s iStream manufacturing process, but replacing the glassfibre content with carbon-fibre. It has been developed in conjunction with Japanese firm Toray, for whom Murray designed the Teewave sports car in 2011, and sandwiches a honeycomb paper core with two carbonfibre skins.

And now there are reports that Yamaha is indeed going ahead and building the Sports Ride. The motorcycle manufacturer isn’t exactly unfamiliar to the four-wheeled world, having been responsible for tuning and/or developing engines for various established manufacturers like Volvo, Toyota, Lexus, and Ford, and even supplying engines for Formula 1 cars for a short while.

And, as befitting a car with Murray’s name attached to it, the Sports Ride will be light, extremely light. The whole shebang, measuring 3,900 mm long, 1,720 mm wide and 1,170 mm tall, weighs in at a paltry 780kgs. That is less than even the Lotus Elise. Much of the concept’s interior could also carry over to production, including a mix of high-quality metal, leather, carbon-fibre and technology borrowed from Yamaha’s music division. A speaker box behind the driver’s head restraint features woodgrain trim and sunburst paint employed by Yamaha’s guitars.

Yamaha is still tight-lipped about powertrain details, but we expect a turbocharged 1.5-litre engine for the production version instead of the MOTIV.e’s 1.0-litre three-cylinder mill.  That would be likely to give the car a power-to-weight ratio in excess of 140 PS per tonne, which, again, is around that of an Elise.

Expect the Yamaha Sports Ride to debut in pre-production form at the 2017 Tokyo Motor Show, with a sticker price of $70,000 in foreign markets.