We were trucking down a Sardinian highway in Italdesign’s Parcour, cornering flatly at speed, when Fabrizio Giugiaro said, “Now I’ll show you what we can do. We see a nice off-road, and there we go.” He promptly drove the megabuck concept car off the pavement and onto a deeply gouged dirt road—and nailed the Lamborghini V-10. I braced for impact, expecting my teeth to rattle from their sockets. That didn’t happen. Then he drifted across ruts and over exposed rocks.

Trying to have your cake and eat it too is a product brief that doesn’t often work in the automotive business. For the most part, a mid-engine sports car is just that, an SUV is an SUV, a sedan is a sedan, and so on. But Fabrizio—son of famed designer Giorgetto—has long toyed with the idea of a dual-purpose, mid-engine exotic car/SUV. Fabrizio’s inspirations were the Paris–Dakar Porsche 959 and his Ducati Multistrada motorcycle. Now that idea has become real, and its name is a perfect fit, “Parcour” being one spelling of the activity that sees runners running, jumping, and clambering over all variety of obstacles, usually in defiance of serious injury—or death.

View Photos JOHN LAMM

Last July, Giugiaro presented the idea for the Parcour to Martin Winterkorn, CEO of Volkswagen, which owns Italdesign via Audi’s Lamborghini subsidiary. You might think of high-level German car execs as rigid minds in starched shirts, but few in the industry are more open to outside-the-box thinking than VW chairman Ferdinand Piëch and, apparently, Winterkorn, who blessed the project. Blending the proportions of a mid-engine sports car and an SUV took until mid-October, with the shape finalized by the end of November. Engineering ate up December, and assembly of the Parcour began on January 7. It was finished on Sunday, March 3, one day before being presented to the VW board (and the world) just ahead of the 2013 Geneva show.

The Parcour is the rare modern vehicle that debuted to universal wonder and awe—and pure WTF. (We speak in the singular, but Italdesign actually showed the vehicle in both coupe and roadster forms, although the latter wasn’t a runner.) Jacked up on 22-inch wheels, the Parcour’s shape is stubby, with short overhangs at both ends that endow it with steep approach and departure angles. Somewhat reminiscent of the famed Lancia Stratos, it is wider and chunkier than that iconic car. And if the Parcour is not necessarily lovable, it is certainly imposing. It’s also unusual, like nothing you’ve seen from VW, but “new and different” is the Italian studio’s mission within the wider group.

Much of the radical bodywork is crafted from aluminum, and Giugiaro points out that the fenders are handmade to sustain the art of aluminum fabrication and to allow for any last-minute tweaks to the design. The central bodywork—the hood, the doors, and the engine cover—is rendered in carbon fiber. The front and rear roof pillars are formed from two pieces, the outer sections bowing away from the body to act as spoilers that direct air along the greenhouse and back over the engine compartment to the rear spoiler. Spent gases from the V-10 are routed under the engine cover, which keeps the exhaust piping up top and not down low, where it could be snagged when off-roading. A theoretical production version of the roadster would have additional structure in the sills to make up for the lack of a roof, as well as hoops behind the cockpit to act as roll bars.

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