This is Vauxhall's lovely GT concept, and they need to make it now

It might look like a novelty computer mouse – albeit a very beautiful one – but the Vauxhall/Opel GT Concept is a fully thought-out little sports car. 

It’s a concept for the Opel and Vauxhall stand at the Geneva Show in March, and it’s the sort of thing we can get right behind. The company’s boss Karl-Thomas Neumann told TopGear.com it doesn’t directly presage a production car, but he hinted it could, and he wants it to. “I need militant requests to do the car after Geneva.” In other words, make a noise, people.

It’s an enchanting and exuberant tiddler. A runner, too. Under the long, low bonnet is a 145bhp version of the lively and light new 1.0 three-cylinder turbo from the Corsa and Astra. It channels its drive to the back wheels. In between is a paddle-operated six-speed. 

Given the whole caboodle is supposed to weigh under 1000kg and has rear-drive traction, the claimed acceleration of 8.0sec for 0-62 sounds honest.

Now, about those silvery windows. They’re actually coated with reflective foil.  Just like advert-wrapped buses. That means from the inside vision is fine.

In fact the window-line is quite low and the roof is glass, so the designers say it feels bright and airy inside despite its bijou dimensions. To keep it snug, the pedals move fore and aft while the seat stays fixed. To get in, touch a sensitised pad in the red dividing line.

The body design might be a bit outlandish, but you can read it in the context of the firm's other recent shapes. The hollowed out lower side resonates from the 2013 Monza saloon. There’s a bit of Astra in the nose, but from there back the forms are far softer. Roller skate wheels inspired the combined rim-and-tyre design, apparently.

Opel and Vauxhall have concept-car history. Just as GM in the States was the first company in the world to have a modern design studio, so the European subsidiaries were the first on this side of the Atlantic.

Opel's Experimental GT and XVR concepts

Opel’s began work in 1963, Vauxhall’s a year after. In 1965 Opel produced the GT concept, a light, simple rear-drive two-seater that became a production car. 

And it doesn’t take much persuasion to get Karl-Thomas Neumann to whip out his phone and show you pictures of the yellow GT he recently bought for himself.

Meanwhile in 1966, exactly 50 years ago at Geneva, Vauxhall’s studio showed an even more radical two-seater called XVR. It was a sort of mashup of the Mako Shark that GM did in Detroit and the psychedelic stuff coming out of Bertone in Turin. Its windscreen was split down the middle, the two halves being part of the gullwing doors. Honest.

Anyway, the XVR never made production, the GT did. So what about today’s GT? Neumann wants to do it, even if he knows it would never make money in itself. 

”There is no business case. It’s a brand investment. The teaser video got half a million clicks in three days. If you build only rational cars you will never succeed. If we do the GT it will help the Astra.”

He insists it must be RWD and small and light. But all GM’s RWD cars are bigger. The smallest is the Cadillac ATS. “That’s the problem,” Neumann concedes.

“It‘s simpler if you do the platform yourself. But if you can’t, you have to look outside.” And that is all he will say.

Maybe we should give him Toyota’s phone number. Remember the Toyota S-FR concept at Tokyo last year?

Well, is it worth getting ‘militant’ over? Comments below please.