Toyota once considered an 86-based shooting brake

A newly revealed concept car built atop the Toyota 86 platform has us lamenting the fact that it was never built. Called the Toyota X86D concept, it was designed at Toyota's Calty studio in Southern California in 2012 but was kept under wraps for over a decade.

Back in 2012, there was much buzz surrounding what was then called the Scion FR-S. The nimble and affordable rear-wheel-drive coupe was a breath of fresh air in a market that hadn't seen a lot of activity in the sports car category. Toyota thought about ways it could expand that platform to other body styles, including what it describes as a "four-door shooting brake." That actually sounds a lot like a plain ol' wagon, but we get it; the (vastly erroneous) conventional wisdom says that wagons aren't cool.

However, a compact wagon the size of an FR-S sounds immensely cool. Toyota's description of the X86D even says an all-wheel-drive drivetrain was part of the plan. AWD or not, it would have benefited from the well-balanced front-engined, rear-drive-biased layout of the 86, as well as its low-profile flat-four engine.