It’s long forgotten now, but famed industrial designer Brooks Stevens created this rakish sports coupe for the April 1954 issue of Car Life magazine.

As a prominent industrial designer of his time, Brooks Stevens (1911-1995) was also a rather prolific speaker and writer, and he had a number of interesing things to say about automobiles and design. For example: It was Stevens who, in a 1954 speech to a conference of Midwestern ad executives, coined the memorable term “planned obsolescence.” So when we fell across an old Car Life magazine article written by Stevens, also from 1954, it immediately caught our attention. So did his illustrations for the story: a pairt of renderings for a four-place sports coupe that we had never seen before.

Back in those days, Car Life was produced in Washington, DC by Henry Scharf, the publisher of Speed Age, and was targeted to the most casual armchair car enthusiasts. In Stevens’ think piece, entitled “Wire Wheels Don’t Make A Sport Car,” he provides a broad history of sports cars in the USA, from Stutz and Mercer to the tiny MG roadsters that began to appear here in significant numbers after World War II, and he underlines the key differences between sports cars and the large, heavy American passenger sedans then on the market. It wasn’t just aesthetics, he asserted. The real contrast was in performance, especially in handling and braking.

With seating for four or more passengers, the Car Life design doesn’t meet Stevens’ definition of a true sports car as described in the article. Rather, it was intended to show how continental sports car styling could be applied to an American passenger car package. In the greenhouse and C pillar we can see hints of the 1953 Studebaker, which Stevens mentions with approval in the article, calling out what he sees as a “a strong European sport car influence.” (A similar roofline was also used on Stevens’ Cadillac-based Die Valkerie dream car.)

Unfortunately, Stevens didn’t bother to give his Car Life sport coupe its own name (beyond his signature Excalibur script on the hood) and as we know, it was never produced. However, the renderings do share some design elements with a Brooks Stevens sports car design that did take physical form: the 1955-57 Gaylord.