The Wildest Concept Cars We Never Got
Though they failed to make production, these wild, weird, and ingenious concept cars stretched the boundaries of what was possible.
Pushing the Design Envelope
Concepts cars serve dual purposes: to promote an automotive brand and to function as a testbed for innovative designs and engineering. The idea for a concept car was pioneered by legendary designer Harley Earl whose Buick Y-Job was a stylistic and technological leap forward, showcasing where GM would be heading over the next decade and a half. Some concepts are good enough, and lucky enough, to make it from the show floor to the dealership floor like the Honda VV concept that birthed the Honda Insight or the Corvette C1 concept that wowed attendees at GM’s 1953 Motorama.
However, those cars are the exception. The majority of concept cars never make the leap to full production. Even so, that doesn’t mean they weren’t successful. The wildest of concept cars help redefine what’s possible and redraw the path forward for designers, engineers, and the car-buying public. Below, we explore automotive history’s wildest, weirdest, most beautiful, and ingenious concept cars that never made it to production.
Lancia Stratos HF Zero Bertone
The Lancia Stratos HF Zero by Bertone is possibly the wedgiest of wedge cars ever created. The rake of its windscreen is so flat the seating position is nearly horizontal (accessible by front hatch). The Stratos Zero was designed in 1970 by Marcello Gandini of the Italian design house Bertone. The car was intended to boost awareness for Scuderia Lancia (the brand’s racing arm) and the new Stratos GT. The radical wedge of the Stratos Zero earned it top honors at this year’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance where it won the Early Wedge Car class.
Bertone B.A.T.5
Speaking of Bertone, the Italian designer’s partnership with Alfa Romeo on a study in aerodynamics gave us not one but three legendary concepts starting in 1953 with the Bertone B.A.T.5 which stands for Berlina Aerodinamica Tecnica. The B.A.T.5’s acronym also referenced its batwing curved rear fins that complimented its missile-like front fenders and grille. The next iteration, the B.A.T.7, refined the earlier car’s look and further accentuated its unique elements, achieving an exceptionally low drag coefficient of .19. For context that’s about where today’s slipperiest EVs sit with the Tesla Model 3 at .208 and the Ludic Air at .197. The B.A.T.7 arrived in 1955 in silver with a red interior with a more conventional body that included smaller rear fins and a proper Alfa Romeo grille and badge up front.
Chrysler Voyager III
Minivan’s high watermark came in the late 1980s. So, it makes sense that Chrysler might imagine “the future of the minivan” with a concept vehicle. The exceedingly odd 1989 Voyager III concept was certainly doing its utmost to draw outside the box. The basic idea was a modular vehicle that combined the capaciousness of a minivan with the urban maneuverability of a hatchback. This translated into a concept that featured two different sections that married together to form one vehicle. The front half of the Voyager III featured three-abreast seating and a retracting rear axle that descended when the two halves decoupled. The back half, dubbed the “mother-in-law module,” had two benches together accommodating up to eight additional passengers and a dual axle. Both sections were covered in an expansive glass canopy roof. Even the propulsion system was unusual as each section had its own engine, the back running a 2.2L turbo and the front a 1.6L propane-fueled three-cylinder engine.
Yamaha OX99-11
Going from the bizarre to the beautiful we encounter the stunning Yamaha OX99-11. The maker of the world’s finest pianos and equally impressive engines created this concept in 1992 to emulate their F-1 racecar, it even used their F-1 racing engine a screaming 3.5L V12 pumping out 400 horsepower and revving up to 10,000 rpm. The OX99-11 featured a fighter jet-style tandem two-seat cockpit, and a curvaceous body designed by the English firm IAD.
Italdesign Machimoto
Italdesign, the design house founded by Giorgetto Giugiaro, created one of the most “innovative” mashups ever to hit a major auto show in 1986. The Machimoto combined a convertible with a pair of motorcycles for a vehicular portmanteau unlike anything before or since. A side-by-side pair of seats allowed for up to nine passengers (all required to wear motorcycle helmets and seat belts). The driver got a modular steering wheel that converted into handlebars and a stick shift. The vehicle’s underpinnings, including its engine, came from a Volkswagen Golf.
Saab Aero-X
The Saab Aero-X from 2006, with its carbon fiber body and a bioethanol powered twin-turbo V6 (400 hp), might appear like an ordinary sports car concept, that is, until you tried to get in. That’s because the Aero-X eschewed the typical supercar doors. No butterfly doors, scissor doors, or gullwing doors here, instead the Aero-X featured an origami-like folding cockpit canopy recalling Saab’s origins as an aeronautics company.
Audi Avus
The Audi Avus was built for the 1991 Tokyo Auto Show as a literally gleaming example of where the German carmaker was heading in the decade to come. The Avus’s most striking feature was its all-aluminum body including reflective body panels beaten and polished to a mirror finish. The car’s other critical component was its 6.0L W12 engine with 509 horsepower. Audi estimated, were the car to make production, the Avus would be capable of 210 mph and a zero to sixty run of roughly three seconds. Sadly, the Avus that arrived in Tokyo was a mockup with real body panels atop a wood and plastic frame. Audi said they were awaiting completion of the as-yet-under-development W12. The Avus wasn’t exactly vapor wear however, the W12 did finally see completion, deploying in the Audi A8 in 2001.
Honda Fuya-Jo
This 1999 concept from the Tokyo Auto Show surely wins the award for concept most resembling a vacuum cleaner. Despite the Hoover-like exterior, the Honda Fuya-Jo was closer to a mobile dance club. The name Fuya-Jo translates to “Sleepless City” in Japanese, perfect for a car designed with the light life in mind. The Fuya-Jo’s upright profile hints at its intended use case, to allow passengers to continue to dance even as they travel between dance clubs. The concept features barstool height seating, boombox styled door cards with massive speakers, and a steering wheel and dash resembling a DJ’s turntable and mixing board.
Ford GT90
Prior to the Ford GT supercar hitting the scene in the early 2000s, there was another attempt to revive the spirit of the original Ford GT40 in the 1990s. The GT90 concept took the underpinnings of the Jaguar XJ220 (Ford owned Jaguar at the time) and gave it a futuristic body shell, updating the original GT40 design with a triangle motif, and a shockingly blue interior. The GT90 was powered by a quad-turbo V12 that put out 720 horsepower, an incredible number in 1995. Ford cited a top speed of 253 mph for the car. Though it didn’t make it to production, the GT90 carried the torch for a proper GT40 successor, the Ford GT, the concept of which debuted in 2002 at the Detroit Auto Show.
Plymouth XNR
The Plymouth XNR concept was built in 1960 as a sort of culmination of the partnership between Chrysler designer Virgil Exner and the Italian design house and couch builder Ghia. Chrysler and Ghia collaborated on several concept cars throughout the 1950s. The XNR combined Italian elegance with Exner’s signature risk-taking for a uniquely asymmetrical design. The theme included using a NASCAR-tuned slant-six engine and an off-set rear fin. The XNR’s fetching gauge cluster design was informed by Exner’s love of photography, made to evoke camera components.
Mercedes Vision AVTR
Jumping far into the 21st century, we encounter one of the most unusual concept cars, new or old. The Mercedes Vision AVTR, first seen at 2020’s CES trade show, explodes our conception of what a “car” can look like and how we interact with one. First, the AVTR’s aesthetic and technical inspiration comes directly from James Cameron’s Avatar film franchise, hence the AVTR name, and borrows much both philosophically and design-wise from the film’s production design. The AVTR blends the mechanical and the organic with its fish-bowl glass doors and massive glowing wheels that evoke bioluminescent sea creatures. The overall aerodynamics call to mind the streamlined bodies of fish and porpoises. How one “drives” the AVTR is even more sci-fi. Rather than a steering wheel, the AVTR uses a “merge device” located on the center console, a sort of joystick operated with the palm down, that allows the car to be driven from either front seat. Designers say interfacing with the AVTR was intended to be an immersive, tactile experience, hence the trading of traditional buttons, screens, and pedals for haptic feedback surfaces, interactive light projection, and other out-of-this-world features.
GM Firebird I, II, III
Returning to where we began, the GM Firebird concepts were created under the auspices of Harley Earl and appeared at GM’s Motorama car shows in the 1950s. The first of the Firebird concepts debuted in 1953 with a Jet Age design that included a turbine engine, months before Chrysler’s Turbine car arrived, and a jet-like fuselage. For the 1956 Motorama, the Firebird II pushed the Space Age aesthetic even further with a larger bubble cockpit canopy, a titanium body, and innovations like a rearview camera system and an auto-leveling suspension. The Firebird III of 1958’s Motorama featured a double bubble cockpit, a wedge-nosed front end long before wedge cars were a thing, and a lot of fins in back resembling rocket stabilizers.
