there are many cars made by car companies during the development of a new model, where they will disguise it, finish it off with parts existing car, or sometimes even leave mechanical components bare. some of these look very interesting, but which ones do you think are the coolest? post at least a picture of the car in question, and mention what it was made to test/what it turned into. i'll start with the chrysler prangler, a car made for tuning the suspension of the plymouth prowler, disguised with a jeep YJ body.
This might not be the prettiest, the nicest, the fastest, or even most interesting prototype, but I’d like to bring up the Mustang V-10 mule. You probably have heard of ford’s Triton V10, which displaced 6.8 liters and was a classic, gas-fuelled, I’m-gonna-rip-out-this-stump truck engine. However, Ford engineers wanted to convince the company that they should build a proper supercar, which eventually came out as the 2005 Ford GT. In order to convince management that they were up to the task, they decided to build an all-new 5.8 liter V10 that was decidedly more performance oriented and could power a supercar project. The Triton V10 was built of the tall-deck architecture of the 5.4, which had an SOHC valvetrain and a split-pin design that wouldn’t easily lend itself to high revs. Since the engineers wanted a supercar engine, they immediately decided to work off of the short-deck 4.6 modular as a base, using heads from the SVT Cobra R in order to give it great power and a freer rev range. All that was done was an extension to the block and heads, and, if I remember correctly, a revised cam and crank. Since Ford wanted a common-pin design for the crankshaft, it meant that it had to be odd-firing, like BMW’s later S85 V10. This made the engine stronger, but also barred the team from using any off-the-shelf ECU, because it only supported even-fire V10s. So, to compensate, they had 2 I5 ECUs running in tandem, sharing the primary sensors. Once they had the engine, they had no supercar to install it in due to the tiny development budget. However, they did find a car to put it in. The engine fit into the 1999 Mustang test mule that Ford had experimented with 5.4 4V engines and various others in, and the car performed very well, running an 11.51 second quarter mile at 118.8 MPH. The published number for one of the cobra V10s (which may have been the later 6.4 and 7.0 variants, made at Ford’s request for concept cars) was 605hp. Naturally aspirated. While the engine never was built in any series production car due to the 2008 recession, it still showed and proved what it needed to: that Ford engineers could find a vision and dream and have the smarts to make something amazing out of it. Because of the story and result, therefore, my favorite mule or prototype might just have to be the V10 Mustang mule. Useful article that helped me write this and can explain the story better to you: https://www.hotrod.com/articles/prototype-v10-ford-mustang/
