Isuzu Built the Best Sports Car Nobody Remembers

Isuzu Built the Best Sports Car Nobody Remembers

Isuzu built one of the best-handling sports cars of the 1990s. Then they went back to selling box trucks.

In 1991, Isuzu — the company your brain filed under "diesel delivery vehicles and the NPR that delivers your Amazon packages" — released the Impulse RS. It had a 1.6-liter turbocharged inline-four making 160 horsepower at 6,600 RPM. All-wheel drive with a viscous center differential. Four-wheel disc brakes. Independent suspension all around. And here's the part nobody believes: the suspension was tuned by Lotus. Not "inspired by" Lotus. Not "Lotus-engineered" in the marketing-department sense. Actual Lotus engineers — from Hethel, England, the same people who built the Esprit and were developing the Elise — flew to Japan, put the Impulse on a lift, and did the work. Isuzu paid a British supercar company to tune a $14,000 hatchback. They showed up and delivered.

The Impulse RS handled like a Group A rally car with a trunk lid. The steering was quick — 2.8 turns lock-to-lock — with feedback that modern electric racks still can't replicate. The throttle response was sharp because the 4XE1 engine was under-square with a short stroke and a lightweight flywheel. The AWD system was developed out of Isuzu's World Rally Championship program, where they campaigned the Gemini in Group A. Zero to 60 in 7.1 seconds. A full second faster than a same-year Civic Si. The quarter mile in 15.4 at 89 mph. It weighed 2,700 pounds. It beat cars costing twice as much on gravel, tarmac, and wet back roads.

Nobody bought one. Isuzu sold fewer than 1,000 Impulse RS units in the United States across the 1991 and 1992 model years. The dealers were commercial truck lots. The sales staff knew NPR diesel specs, fleet contract terms, and box truck financing rates. A turbocharged all-wheel-drive sports hatch with Lotus suspension sat on the showroom floor next to a cab-over delivery truck while the guy who should have been selling it was showing a landscaping company their new flatbed. The Impulse was invisible to the people it was built for.

The chassis that underpinned the Impulse was the same platform as the Isuzu Gemini — a car that won the 1990 Safari Rally overall and took class wins in the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship. The RS was the final, most aggressive version of a platform that had been winning rallies since the mid-80s.

This was the Isuzu pattern. They built the VehiCROSS — a tube-frame, carbon-fiber-clad off-roader in 1999 that looked like a concept vehicle that escaped from the Tokyo Motor Show and went feral. Recaro seats, Bilstein shocks, advanced torque-on-demand 4WD. Isuzu sold 4,153 of them across three years. Collectors now pay $20,000 for clean examples.

They built the Rodeo and Trooper — two SUVs that competed credibly with the 4Runner and Pathfinder before a Consumer Reports rollover accusation cratered sales. They built the D-Max diesel, which Thailand and Australia treat as a religious object. The 4JJ1 engine is so overbuilt that Australian mining companies spec it for underground use because nothing else survives.

And then they stopped. In 2008, Isuzu exited the US passenger vehicle market entirely. No farewell tour. No last model year tribute. Just gone. They went back to commercial trucks and diesel engines because that's what made money and that's what their dealers understood.

The Impulse RS, the VehiCROSS, the Piazza, the Stylus — every one of them proof that Isuzu knew how to build serious performance cars. They understood chassis dynamics, forced induction, and rally-bred all-wheel drive. They collaborated with Lotus when most manufacturers were still bolting on bigger sway bars and calling it a day. They just couldn't sell the result. That's the difference between a great engineering company and a great car company. Isuzu was only ever one of those.