REVEALED: Holden’s top secret Veyron beater

WHO knew it? The humble Holden Ute almost spawned a Bugatti Veyron-crushing supercar.

Revealed in the September 2016 issue of Wheels magazine, Australia’s most experienced and most trusted car magazine since 1953.

Wheels has uncovered stillborn plans to develop an all-electric, supercar-thrashing Australian-made two-door coupe based on the humble Holden hay-hauler. It almost sounds too good to be true, but it very nearly became a reality.

We’ve also seen a video confirming the existence of the Super Ute, a car Holden wanted to use to stun the world before the bosses in Detroit stepped in to crush it. The car seen here is an artist’s impression of what we saw in that grainy footage, and the only image of what the secret car could have become had production been approved.

Holden funnelled serious money into testing and developing the car, with mind-blowing results. Think 0-100km/h times shorter than it takes to read this sentence.

The Super Ute can trace its heritage back to Holden’s 1969 Hurricane concept car. Poised to be the greatest car ever built in Australia, the Super Ute only made it as far as a secret internal reveal before the project was shelved.

It wasn’t just Holden that would have put the Super Ute into showrooms, with plans laid out for a global attack. Cadillac, Opel, and Chevrolet were all willing to jump on board. This would have placed Australia’s design and engineering prowess on show for the entire world.

Despite eventually being put down, rumours of the Super Ute live on. Spy images snapped last year show a VE Ute transformed into a mid-engined test car – sources have confirmed to Wheels that some of the Super Ute’s DNA lives on in the wild-looking mule.