My favorite little bizarre design detail is the windows.

It has half windows, like so many iconic cars like the DeLorean or the Countach (or the Subaru SVX). Of course if you look at the size of the doors, and the fact that this car has such a high belt line and low roofline, there’s absolutely no reason that the entire window shouldn’t be able to roll down. I guess you could also say that’s true of the SVX but I assume that its (for the time) low belt line and high roofline with large glass area made it impractical to roll the whole window down whereas there definitely wouldn’t be any problem on this Spyker.

But structurally this car is a four door hardtop. There is no B-pillar or frames around the windows, and they seal together with a trim piece that’s part of the window rather than part of the car. No real-world car has ever been designed or built that way, most cars that have a half window set inside the main window have it surrounded on all sides by glass, and the few that don’t, like the SVX, have traditional window frames to keep them aligned. Just having a big piece of glass cantilevered over the hole where the half window goes (especially two of these that are supposed to meet and have a weathertight seal) seems like a bad idea.

So my question is, if this were to have made it into production, in this original D12 form, what would it have looked like with the windows down? Would it be like a weird hardtop with a small unbroken opening? Would that chrome trim along the edge between the doors be a structural part that doesn’t roll down? In that case why design it to have no B-pillar? Lots of concept cars from that era were designed as hardtops with no intent of actually being produced that way but those did it for the wide open airy feel, combining that with the claustrophobic feel of half windows is just such a weird design choice.

It’s kind of a moot point because this was from the era when every concept car was a hardtop, the production model likely would have had normal windows and doors. Also there are pictures of this car being displayed with the doors open, and it appears that not only are the windows fixed in place for display, not functional or designed to roll down, they even appear to be single panes of glass with the seam between the main window and the roll-down half window being fake trim stuck on for aesthetics. So clearly even the designers didn’t really give any thought to how they would work because it was just for show.

But perhaps the strangest part is that when they reworked it into the D8 they dropped the weird half windows entirely, now they’re one piece. That version was also shown off with the windows down, for a big airy open appearance like a normal hardtop. But the crazy part is that this wasn’t done by removing the fixed in place windows, the D8 appeared to have fully functional windows because there are pictures of it with the rear windows half rolled down. Most modern concept cars don’t really have functional windows, they fake the look by taking some pictures with the windows in place and then removing them for other pictures. Every once in a while there will be a fully functional concept car that has working windows, but these are usually done by big manufacturers like GM or Chrysler that can afford to pour money into a show car so they can lend it to Top Gear or science fiction movie shoots for publicity. The fact that a small company like Spyker seems to have gone through the trouble to make the windows functional on the D8 version, a particularly difficult engineering challenge on a hardtop, is really unusual and makes me wonder if they actually intended for the production version to be a real four door hardtop, which would have been the first in over 15 years.