There was a time — not so very long ago — when cars had presence. Real presence. They didn’t blink at you with LED eyelashes or greet you with a software update. They simply rolled into view… and owned the horizon.
And then along comes this.
A shooting brake. But not the sort dreamt up by a marketing committee after three oat-milk lattes and a PowerPoint presentation about “lifestyle synergy.” No. This looks like it was commissioned by someone who stares at modern traffic and mutters, “Good grief, when did everything become so terribly dull?”
Just look at it.
The bonnet stretches ahead like an expensive promise. The roofline flows backwards with the sort of confidence normally reserved for Olympic sprinters. And the stance? Oh yes — low, wide, and purposeful enough to suggest that if mountains appeared in its path, they would politely move aside.
What makes it truly fascinating, however, is what it refuses to do.
It refuses to chase lap records.
It refuses to scream for attention.
It refuses to be one of many.
Because this is a one-off — the automotive equivalent of a tailored Savile Row suit in a world drowning in fast fashion.
Imagine driving it at dawn. Empty road. Pale sunlight glinting off sculpted metal. No driver aids chirping, no unnecessary theatrics — just you, the machine, and the faint suspicion that everyone else has made a terrible mistake with their SUV.
This isn’t transport.
It’s a statement.
Proof that restraint can be more dramatic than excess… and that true sophistication doesn’t need to raise its voice.
Will it change the industry? Probably not.
Great disruptions rarely announce themselves.
But will it make every other car feel just a little bit ordinary?
Oh absolutely.
And that, frankly, is rather the point.
Modern car design is currently suffering from a severe case of “over-caffeinated committee” syndrome. Every time a new model is unveiled, it feels like it was designed by twelve different departments that aren’t on speaking terms. You have the aerodynamics team demanding holes everywhere, the software team insisting on a dashboard that looks like a smartphone screen, the marketing department screaming for “aggressive” LED signatures that can be seen from low Earth orbit. And then engineers, with their weight distributions and lateral accelerations and wheels sizes and safety features.
By now you probably have gotten the idea that I don’t have a subscription to modern car clubs, mostly because Homo Automobilis (that’s what our species evolved into after the invention of the engine-powered car) seems to have lost its ability to appreciate and create automotive beauty right around the seventies. There are, of course, exceptions, but let’s face it: between a 1956 Continental and a 2026 Corsair, what color would you like your Mk II to come in?
If you’re still on the fence, look at Jaguar Type Double-Nothing. They spell it Type 00 – those are two zeroes, but let’s not get tangled up in technicalities, it’s still fugly, and it puts shooting breaks in a bad light. And frankly, that’s beyond preposterous – twice. Not only is that tarnishing a classic staple style that emerged from the same land that gave us the Jaguar supercars (Twin-Nil not included), but it’s making shooting brakes look bad in the same way the Mustang Mach-E is making the 1969 Boss 302 by calling it “brother.”
Thankfully, there are still endeavoring souls out there, in the vast infinity of the hexadecimal environments, where one can have an idea and do with it as they please, without having to bow to EPA, NHTSA, NCAP, or the rest of the two-point-thirty-five million governing bodies telling people how a car should look, feel, behave, cost, and so on.
Case in point: the car presented in digital form (unfortunately) by the creative mind from route66.designhouse. Ironically, their headquarters are located in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. In case automotive geography isn’t somebody’s major, please note that Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW for short) has its central offices in Munich. And where’s the irony? The pixel manipulators have gone and imagined a Mercedes-Benz.
Not just any Merc (as if that would have made any difference), but the iconic widow maker from the fifties, the original supercar, the 300 SL. The Gullwing. When the Germans built it, seventy years ago, it was available as a two-door coupe or convertible roadster. The visualizers of 2026 have imagined a third option – one much more suited for trips where extra cargo space is mandated: a shooting break.
Out of the digital ether, comes this two-door shooting brake—a body style that is effectively a unicorn of the automotive world. The numbers of doors is important, because lately, several body styles have tried to impersonate the two-door “sportswagon,” by borrowing the sloped rear for a four-door platform.
This proposal is a render (for now), a design study existing only in the cold vacuum of a GPU’s memory, but it possesses more soul than most of the cars currently sitting in a showroom around Planet Automobile. What’s so special about it? well, it’s correctness, for one. To understand why this render feels so right, we have to look back—way back—long before the internal combustion engine began its merciless assault to establish the horseless age.
The term “Shooting Brake” wasn’t coined by a marketing guru in a glass office; it was forged in the mud and mist of the rainy British countryside. In the 1800s, a “brake” was a heavy, four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage used to “break in” spirited young horses – namely, to train a colt with the harnesses and the skills required for drawing carts and wagons and whatnot. It was a utilitarian frame, often lacking a formal body, designed to be dragged behind a team composed of a veteran horse and a youngster.
However, the landed gentry—the kind of people who spent their weekends thinning out the local pheasant or hare population—realized these sturdy chassis were perfect for transport. By adding longitudinal benches and racks for firearms, the “shooting brake” was born. It was the original “Lifestyle Vehicle,” used by the aristocracy to carry hunting parties, their dogs, their guns, and their ammunition into the heart of their hunting grounds and back. It was a vehicle defined by two things: immediate practicality and exuberant social status symbol.
As the horse was shown the way of the deli by the piston, the concept evolved but the clientele remained the same. In the early 20th century, wealthy motorists would buy a rolling chassis and send it to a coachbuilder. They wanted the front half to be a luxury coupe for the driver and a passenger, and the back half to be a spacious cargo bay for their sporting gear.
By the 1960s, the Shooting Brake had reached its “Golden Era.” It became the ultimate “I’ve made it” statement. If you drove a Ferrari 250 GT, you were fast. But if you commissioned a 1965 Aston Martin DB5 Shooting Brake or a Volvo 1800ES, you had so much style—and luggage to match it—that a standard trunk simply wouldn’t suffice. It was the car of the man who owned the mountain, not just the man who drove up it (those had Land Rovers and Broncos).
At first glance, your brain screams “Mercedes-Benz,” but it’s not because of a badge. It’s because of the proportions. This concept understands the fundamental rule of the “Silver Arrow” legacy: the Prestige Gap. That’s the distance between the front axle and the A-pillar. On this hypothetical car, that distance is measured in feet, hinting at massive longitudinal engine—perhaps a twin-turbo V12?—slung far back behind the front wheels for perfect balance.
The hood is a direct nod to the 1954 300 SL Gullwing, but without the retro-pastiche that usually ruins modern homages. There are strong influences from modern-day Mercs (like the AMG SLS or the AMG GT, or the McLaren-Mercedes SLR) but the roots are unmistakably Gullwing. The entire sideline is a single, uninterrupted stroke of a pen, flowing from the top of the grille and diving toward the rear haunches with the grace of a feather falling from an angel’s wing.
Look closely at the surfacing: there isn’t a single “angry” line, no fake plastic vents, no jagged zig-zags in the sheet metal to “create excitement.” Instead, it uses Sensual Purity—the design philosophy Gorden Wagener championed before it got lost in the quest for “digital-first” aesthetics. Flared rear wheel arches gives the car a “Coke-bottle” waist that makes it look like it’s leaning back on its heels, ready to pounce.
The wheels are oversized, yes, but they fill the arches with a geometric precision that suggests the car was carved from a single block of billet aluminum. The round headlamps are unapologetically retro, with LED bezels for a touch of modernity. However, the interior is polarizing. The digital artist proposed three versions of the cabin, and one of them doesn’t do the car justice.
The Hyperscreen stretching from door to door might be the trend today, but analog dials and a proper stick shifter (albeit for a fully automatic transmission) feel so much more proper in this conceptual time machine. This doesn’t express itself in TOPS and neural processing capabilities. It’s Metal, not Megabytes, and it burns high-octane gasoline and rubber (dual exhaust pipes tell the tale).
Noisy? You bet! Loud? That’s why it exists! Offending? No, because computers don’t have feelings. It is a digital ghost of what the automobile should represent. It makes SUV look like runaway living rooms chasing a fashion magazine’s front cover to hide from a shooting party thundering down the road searching for trophies to hang on the hallway walls.
