What if a Toyota bZ4X traveled to the past in order to save humanity’s future? It might look like this Moonstone.
When’s the last time a Mitsubishi really caught your eye? Sure, the new Outlander is striking, as far as mainstream SUVs goes, but it’s nothing like the Mitsubishi Moonstone concept you see here. This design, however, doesn’t originate from one of Mitsubishi’s design studios. Instead, it’s a student design project from the Master Course in Transportation Design at IED Torino. The students there were given a brief from Mitsubishi: design a futuristic electric crossover with performance and technology in equal measure. Moonstone is the result.
A total of 17 proposals were submitted, and three made it to the final round, but Moonstone took the prize: it was transformed from proposal into a prototype, which is what you see here. The result is an arresting two-door crossover with proportions that, from the beltline up, seem more sports car than sport utility. There’s a bit of Stratos to the angular greenhouse, although it appears to have a hidden A-pillar. Bold, contrasting fenders recall the Toyota bZ4X and Subaru Solterra fraternal twins, and maybe this will be a feature adopted more widely by other automakers—a styling feature having its moment, so to speak, like the floating rooflines that have been in vogue for a while.
The front end is bold, with a strongly jutting chin spoiler and a divorced headlight/DRL/turn signal lamp arrangement that shares a family resemblance with other Mitsubishi products, like the new Outlander. Things get truly weird around back, where there’s some dramatic contrast between the inset “grilles” and the protruding kammback. Hammer-shaped taillights add a bit of flavor to the very three-dimensional rear, which is most apparent in profile.
All in all, the all-terrain sporty utility two-door shape has us thinking about one of the wildest semi-mainstream vehicles that ever reached production, and clearly must have loosely inspired the Moonstone: the Isuzu VehiCross. When most SUVs were boxy and boring, the swoopy VehiCross smashed convention and garnered a lot of attention. (Sales? Maybe not so much. But could you have modern fastback-ish “coupe-uvs” without it?)
We doubt that the Moonstone will ever reach production—the market for two-door crossovers is basically nonexistent, as the Suzuki X-90 and others proved.
But even dead-end concepts can be great breeding grounds for design ideas, and we’ll have to keep an eye out for any of Moonstone’s exaggerated, stylized elements translated into future designs.
