Design story - Peugeot RCZ, a watershed between past and future     by Fabio Galvano   To celebrate the company’s bicentennial, Peugeot has launched a car that links the past with the future. Presented as a concept in September 2007 at Frankfurt, the RCZ made the transition to production in record time. And a production car it is, however much Peugeot’s marketing machine wants us to think of it as a special niche model. One thing is for certain though, this coupé – whose impressive performance we experienced for ourselves on the snaking roads of Spain’s renowned Rioja wine region – not only brings the concept of pure driving fun back into Peugeot’s product range, it also hints at the styling cues we’ll be seeing in other cars created under the new stewardship of Gilles Vidal. And this is true despite the fact that it still bears the gaping lion’s mouth, which once expressed Gérard Welter’s sportier leanings and which the French marque has already decided to ditch (as testified by the SR1 concept presented at Geneva). The original intention of Peugeot’s designers was to maintain, in the RCZ, the stylistic spirit of the concept in spite of the challenge this posed in terms of meeting all the constraints involved in production. That show car – inspired, incredibly, by a pickup with a cab-forward architecture seen at the SEMA aftermarket show in Las Vegas – was simply too much of a hit to ignore, so the decision to turn it into a production reality came almost immediately. (The article continues in Auto & Design n. 183, page 26)