may not be selling a whole lot of cars these days, but we think this roofless Grand Vitara Marine concept the automaker is bringing to SEMA contains some winning elements. The Marine concept began life as a 2012 Grand Vitara SUV—which has a fair bit of off-road chops—but was completely redone with a nautical theme by students at Ohio Technical College for the SEMA show.
To beef up the Grand Vitara for marine duty, OTC students jacked the suspension skyward with a lift kit and fitted upsized chrome wheels wrapped in meaty off-road tires. There’s a tough-looking front Bull bar bumper and winch, tubular side steps, a hood scoop, and the door handles were shaved. The biggest modification to the Grand Vitara was the removal of its roof; it’s replaced by a speedboat-style basket handle over the rear, to which a pair of spotlights and two fishing poles were mounted. The front doors are pillarless, and the side glass was cut to resemble the tapering style of a speedboat’s wraparound windshield. Other nautical touches include a surfboard-shaped rearview mirror and wave graphics behind the front wheels. The Marine concept’s rear-mounted Suzuki outboard motor does go, ahem, overboard with the boat theme a bit.
The Grand Vitara Marine concept looks a bit like a remastered Isuzu Amigo convertible, which we dig. Spare us the apparently pointless outboard motor, cheesy body-side graphics, and the fishing poles, and we’d happily hit the trails in this one.
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