Carcajou Concept Car

This car represented Aurora’s venue into the concept car, which they intended to reveal at the 1976 Montreal car show. The name Carcajou is French for ‘Wolverine’. Designer Alfonse Gauthier said he got the idea from the wide front shape of the car. Alfonse said the car was supposed to resemble a four seater version of a Le Mans race car. One of Aurora’s engineers gave an interview about the more colorful parts of building the car. Here’s a quote from the Toronto Gazette.

“After the hard time we had trying to fit an engine into the Celestia, we were all looking forward to the smooth time we all anticipated we would have while fitting an engine into the Carcajou. The car was huge, and we had so much room to work with, some were even thinking we could stick a big block V8 in there. No problem. Alfie (Alfonse) wanted to build a V12 out of two V6’s we had for the Celestia, but we didn’t have the time or money for engine balancing. So we’re all thinking we’ll just be sticking the Thunderbolt's V8 in there. Next thing you know, Alfie comes into the shop with this great big f@&% off of a Jaguar V12. It was the biggest engine some of us had ever laid eyes on. I thought half the team was going to start crying as they’re looking at what is likely to be the cause of their future divorce.

So I goes up to Alfie and ask what does he intend to do with that? He said it’s going in Carcajou, isn’t it? Well we’ll see about that. So we crane it up, and miracle of St Andy, it actually fit between the uprights. The top part of the engine, however, was sticking a full four inches above where the hood would be. And Alfie just goes ‘Cut a hole in this part of the hood and put a great big air scoop to feed the supercharger’. And the whole team let out a huge sigh of relief.

And since we’re trying to make this look futuristic, we put a TV screen in the dashboard which we originally intended to hold a back up camera. The problem was we couldn’t find a video camera small enough, made with mid 1970’s technology, that could put up with the heat from the engine. So at the last minute I scrapped the closed circuit, went to RadioShack and bought a portable five inch Sony. We stuffed it in the dashboard and just moved the buttons around to make it look like it was special made for the car.

People loved it. And the car looked so futuristic that over the years we rented it out to a few Hollywood productions that displayed in science fiction TV shows like Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and the Six Million Dollar Man.”