Wild game-based VW Roadster hits LA show

Volkswagen's wild topless Golf GTI Roadster makes its North American debut at the Los Angeles auto show next week.

VW says it "erases the boundaries between the virtual and real worlds."

Indeed, it looks unreal. And in fact the design was created for a video game: GranTurismo 6 for the Sony PlayStation3.

Executed in three dimensions for the show circuit, the GTI Roadster is powered by a 3-liter, twin-turbocharged V-6 engine rated 503 horsepower and 413 pounds-feet of torque, driving through a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic into a 4Motion all-wheel-drive system. It's shorter, wider than a conventional GTI, and sits much lower.

VW says it should blast from standstill to 60 mpg in just 3.5 seconds and will hit 192 mph on a track.

Klaus Bischoff, VW head of design, says, "When Sony asked us if we would develop a Vision GTI vehicle exclusively for the game to mark the 15th anniversary of Gran Turismo we didn't hesitate for a moment."

He says designers started with the video game car and scaled it into a real machine, which left them go wilder than if they had begun with a real car and tried to modify it into something resembling a video game automobile.

The GTI Roadster is an evolution of the Design Vision GTI concept showed in L.A. in 2013.