While it may have had its fans, we have to say we don’t much miss the roadster family which General Motors based on its Kappa platform. Sold alternately as the Pontiac Solstice, Saturn Sky, Opel GT and Daewoo G2X (depending largely on the market), the roadster as much about style as substance, and it was summarily discontinued in 2009 as GM’s domestic brands faltered. But now a company in Spain has given the two-seat roadster a new lease on life.
That company is called Tauro Sport Auto, and its version – called, simply enough, the V8 Spider – is a fairly comprehensive rework. As you might have discerned from the name, it replaces the four-cylinder engine with a V8 also from the GM parts bin: the 6.2-liter LS3 Corvette engine, which it offers in 440, 480 and bonkers 650 horsepower states of tune with the addition of new cylinder heads and a supercharger.
How the chassis is able to handle that much power is another matter, but the interior unfortunately appears to carry over largely unchanged from the Pontiac. Pricing, though, starts at a very un-Solstice-like €100,000, or about $125k at today’s rates. Which strikes us as about right for a Latin-flavored eight-cylinder roadster, but a tad much for a Kappa convertible.
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