Concepts that time forgot: the Mercedes VRC

Does your dream four-car garage consist of a saloon, estate, convertible and pickup but you simply don’t have the room? Well Mercedes had just the thing for you at the 1995 Geneva motor show – the Vario Research Car was four cars in one, with the different modules able to be changed in minutes like trying on shoes.

In trying to be all things almost at once, the VRC was the right answer to the wrong question – how can a car company come up with something that suits all occasions? Of course, the answer turned out to be SUVs, which Mercedes has embraced with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm in the intervening years. 

Mercedes had it all planned out – perhaps you’d like the three-door coupe for driving to work during the week, you’d slip on the ‘station wagon’ back end for extra luggage space in the holidays, or maybe you’d slip away for a nice picnic on a sunny day with the convertible.

Off to the tip? You can chuck whatever you like in the pickup version of the car, except perhaps the other bits of bodywork.

Mercedes had done some ‘research’ which showed that people would like to do different things in the future, for which they would need different vehicles to help.

Well, you’ve got the base two-door car with all the usual vehicular essentials (front end, most of the cabin, the wheels, etc) and what Mercedes calls the superstructure, which can be lifted off and replaced in a mere 15 minutes.

Mercedes didn’t actually think that you would make the change yourself, rather you’d rent the car and occasionally pop by the Merc garage and get someone to change it for you while you have a cup of coffee and read through well-thumbed copies of Top Gear magazine in the waiting room. 

Mercedes designed the superstructures to be as light as possible, constructed out of carbon fibre reinforced plastic. They claimed that each one weighed between 30 and 50kg each. Additionally, they were designed to be as easy as possible to switch, with eight locking points to fix bodywork and car together. There were additional complications – if the station wagon rear was put on then the rear wiper and washer would need to work. 

Mercedes didn’t actually say at the time what was supposed to be powering the VRC – perhaps the humdrum reality of a 1.6-litre four-cylinder petrol unit or whatever else they would have shoehorned in would have ruined the concept car magic. What they did say was that this front-drive car used a CVT transmission and drive-by-wire technology. 

The VRC featured a colour central display and onboard satnav – très fancy for 1995. Mercedes also developed early speed limit warning systems for the car, and even used a radar sensor to tell you when you were too close to the car in front. Perhaps that should be mandatory on German-made cars. 

The VRC itself wasn’t sent into showrooms, but some of the underlying gubbins saw eventual action. Mercedes used the VRC as a sneaky way to test its front-wheel-drive tech, which was later seen in action on the 1997 A-Class. Also useful on the A-Class was the Active Body Control tech that Merc boffins developed on the VRC – although it wouldn’t be a priority until the infamous elk test fiasco. 

One remarkably forward thinking aspect of the VRC concept is the ownership idea – Volvo has introduced a scheme where you pay a monthly rental fee and the company throws everything in, while Chinese start-up Lynk and Co is soon to launch in Europe with a business model that sees customers trading their cars in for different models when the need arises… something sporty for the holidays, that sort of thing. Sadly no bolt-on pickups though.