The cool concept cars we totally forgot about

This might happen almost entirely in secret, or as a way of promoting the brand at an international motor show, or something in between. Concepts of one kind or another have been around since at least the 1930s. Many remain in the public memory for years, but most are quickly forgotten as soon as a new batch turns up. For example, do you remember this remarkable concept limousine from Citroën in 2010?

From many hundreds of possibilities, here are 44 of the perhaps less well-remembered concepts in automotive history, listed in chronological order. If you recognise more than ten of them, you’re doing very well.

The Atom was a small and dramatically styled saloon initially fitted with a 2.0-litre overhead-cam engine, though this was replaced by a very slightly larger-capacity pushrod unit in 1944.

David Brown (1904-1993) drove it shortly before deciding to buy the company, so he must have been impressed, but there was never to be a production version.

Designed primarily by Virgil Exner (1909-1973) and built by Ghia, the Falcon was a racey two-seat roadster powered by a 4.5-litre version of the Chrysler Hemi V8 engine.

Revealed two years after the original Chevrolet Corvette, and around the same time as the first-generation Ford Thunderbird, it might have been a competitor for both, but Chrysler decided not to go ahead with it.

Marcello Gandini (born 1938) must have been looking the future square in the face when he designed the low wedge shape and scissor doors for the mid-engined Carabo. Alfa Romeo did not allow it to go beyond the concept stage, and it’s possible that the world just wasn’t ready for something like this in the 1960s.

However, the Carabo bears a strong resemblance to another car designed by Gandini. This was the Lamborghini Countach which, unlike the earlier concept, went on sale in 1974.

At first glance, the RX-500 seemed like it had been designed for the same reasons as the Alfa Romeo Carabo. It had a wedge shape (though not quite as extreme as the Carabo’s), a mid-mounted engine (in this case a twin-rotor), butterfly swing doors and gullwing engine covers.

All of this screamed ‘supercar!’, but in fact the RX-500 was intended as a showcase for Mazda’s research into safety. Among other things, it had a row of lights at the rear to indicate to following traffic whether the car was accelerating, maintaining speed or closing down.

Yet another wedge-shaped concept from 1970 (there was a lot of that sort of thing going on at the time), the 126X had the same changing-rear-light feature also found on the Mazda RX-500.

Its shape was slightly less supercar-like, though in some ways even odder, than those of either the Mazda or the Alfa Carabo. In one respect Nissan went a step ahead of the other manufacturers mentioned – access to the interior was via a canopy which hinged from the front and consisted of the roof, windscreen and front body panels.

Mechanically, the Cirrus fastback was simply a Ford Escort RS1600, the Cosworth BDA-powered hot version of the first-generation small saloon.

It didn’t look like one because its design was based on the winning entry in a car design competition organised by the Institute of British Carriage and Automobile Manufacturers and promoted by the Daily Telegraph. It later transpired that the successful entrant was a professional designer who worked for Chrysler.

Volvo was already famous for its insistence on car safety when it unveiled the VESC at the 1972 Geneva Motor Show. It was full of equipment which was unusual at the time but very common now, including many airbags, automatically deploying headrests, anti-lock brakes, automatic fuel supply cut-off, an integrated rollcage, acoustic reversing warning and a steering wheel which was pulled forward in a frontal impact.

The overall styling reappeared in slightly toned-down form in the Volvo 200 series, which went on sale in 1974.

Italdesign’s response to a challenge laid down by the New York Museum of Modern Art was only four metres long, but it could seat five people and had space under the seats to fit folded wheelchairs. To add to the practicality, there were sliding doors on both sides, a very unusual feature for 1976.

The project stopped after the vehicle was built, which is why you don’t associate Alfa Romeo with New York cabs today. Shame, as it’s an intriguing concept.

Styled to look like the AMC Pacer, this van was one of seven vehicles created for the Concept 80 tour created by AMC to showcase its ideas about future small, fuel-efficient products.

It was said to have four-wheel drive, and the word ‘turbo’ appeared on both sides, but it was in fact a non-functioning model. It found a new owner in summer 2022.

Creating an estate version of the second-generation Firebird was an idea which gained a surprising amount of traction within General Motors. Two concepts were built, and the one shown here was later updated to reflect a facelift of the standard model in 1979.

Features included gullwing doors allowing access not to the cabin but to the luggage compartment. Thoughts of production were dashed for several reasons, not least the fact that the car would have been spectacularly expensive to manufacture.

Italdesign returned to the one-box body shape of the Alfa Romeo New York Taxi when it devised the Megagamma two years later.

Lancia felt that the Megagamma would not appeal to enough buyers, but this might have been a mis-step. The Renault Espace, designed on similar principles and released six years after the Megagamma project was cancelled, proved to be a big success.

The only connections between the Megagamma and the Sibilio are that they both appeared at the 1978 Turin Motor Show and both wore Lancia badges. Otherwise, they were as different as chalk and China.

The Bertone-designed Sibilo was essentially a longer and even more outlandish-looking version of the Stratos. Both the concept and the production car were powered by a 2.4-litre Ferrari V6 engine.

ETV stands for ‘electric test vehicle’, which is exactly what this concept was – a way for Chrysler to try out its electrical drive systems on a working car.

In contrast to the current situation, public enthusiasm for electric vehicles was minimal in 1979, so the ETV-1 never made it past the development stage.

The Medusa was a derivative of the mid-engined Lancia Montecarlo with a supremely aerodynamic body designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro (born 1938). It might have become the DeLorean DMC-24 saloon, but that idea evaporated when the DeLorean company collapsed.

Instead, the design became the inspiration for another concept car, the Lamborghini Marco Polo of 1982.

The RS 002 was never intended to be only a concept. Using the same mechanicals found in the Quattro rally cars, this mid-engined coupe was one of several cars built for the Group S international motorsport regulations which were due to replace Group B in 1987.

A series of terrible crashes led to the abandonment of Group S in favour of the more production-based Group A. The RS 002 could not have been built in large enough numbers to qualify, so the project was cancelled before the car took part in a single event.

The original E1 was an early modern attempt to develop an electric car from scratch rather than adapting an existing model (as BMW had done with the 1602 Elektro-Anrtrieb 19 years before). It was well received by reviewers, including ours, and was followed up by another attempt in 1993.

As interesting as all this was, it did not immediately lead to a production model. The all-electric BMW i3 would not reach dealerships until 2013.

Stranger-looking even than the later Renault Avantime, the F 100 would probably never have found more than a handful of buyers, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that it introduced technology which Mercedes would use in passenger cars over the following decade, such as gas-discharge headlights, voice recognition, electronic tyre pressure monitoring and a chip card instead of conventional car keys.

The F 100 was also planned to be capable of warning the driver about imminent hazards, and had two square metres of solar panels on the roof, generating up to 100W of electricity.

Displayed at Disneyland Paris, the Reinastella (named after a real Renault produced briefly around 1930) was a completely fictional machine said to be part of the company’s line-up in the 2328 model year.

Choosing the appropriate tense becomes difficult here, so we’ll pretend we’re in speaking from the mid 24th century and report that the Reinastella could fly 15cm above the road in town and 150 metres above it in the country, and had a maximum speed of 186mph. During desert testing, a prototype crashed and seems to have absorbed the bodies of its two occupants. For production versions, Renault used a modified structure which was incompatible with mammals.

The Downtown was a tiny electric car with an overall length of just three metres but enough space for three occupants – a driver up front and two passengers in the rear.

For a car with a claimed top speed of 62mph, the Downtown looks alarmingly top-heavy, but its centre of gravity was probably quite low. The batteries were mounted between the rear wheels, and the aluminium chassis was covered by plastic body panels.

Although it was badged as a Buick and displayed at three large US auto shows, the XP2000 was in fact developed a world away GM’s Australian brand, Holden.

Based on the V platform (itself originally the work of Opel in Germany), the XP2000 showed a lot of promise as a future production car, but GM decided not to go ahead with it.

The Gaus was an SUV concept whose side doors were divided in two. The top half retracted upwards, while the lower half folded down for use as a step.

No production version was developed, but if it had been, its doors would almost certainly have been more conventional.

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The Fiftie commemorated the half-century since the public launch of Renault’s first post-War car, the 4CV (which it somewhat resembled), thought that car did not in fact go on sale until 1947.

Resemblances between the two went no further than a similar shape and some small design details. Very much unlike the 4CV, the Fiftie was based on the aluminium frame created for the Renault Sport Spider, and had carbonfibre bodywork.

Like the Renault Fiftie, the Phaeton was a tribute to its maker’s past. It looked like a modern interpretation of several previous Chryslers, though perhaps most obviously the Newport Phaeton, one example of which was used as the pace car for the 1941 Indianapolis 500 race.

The Phaeton ran on 22-inch wheels and was powered by a 5.4-litre V12 engine, reputed to be two versions of Chrysler’s 2.7-litre V6 joined together.

The 18/3 Chiron dates from the early days of Bugatti’s ownership by Volkswagen. Three concepts were produced at around the same time, and they were all powered by a 6.3-litre 555bhp engine which had 18 cylinders arranged in three banks – hence the 18/3 part of the car’s name.

The rest of it refers to Monegasque driver Louis Chiron (1899-1979), who competed in several makes of car but is perhaps best known for his exploits in Bugattis. The Chiron name was placed on Bugatti’s hypercar that launched in 2016.

Another famous racing driver commemorated in a concept car was Bernd Rosemeyer (1909-1938), whose name was used for a fabulous Audi built at the turn of the 21st century. All of Rosemeyer’s success came at the wheel of the ferocious mid-engined Auto Union single-seaters. 

The concept closely resembled those, despite being a two-door coupe, and its engine had the same number of cylinders – 16 – though in this case they were arranged in a W rather than a V formation. Rosemeyer himself was killed in a land speed record attempt on the A5 autobahn near Frankfurt in January 1938.

Developed by DaimlerChrysler in association with scooter manufacturer Razor, this concept was a minimalist sports car powered by a turbocharged 2.4-litre four-cylinder engine producing around 250bhp.

It might have served as an interesting rival to the Mazda MX-5 if it had ever gone into production, but that didn’t happen.

The Se-Ro, also referred to as SE RO, was the second of two concepts which led to the development of a production kei car. As such, it was less than 3.5 metres long and had a 660cc engine.

Its polished aluminium bodywork, deliberately styled to make the car look like an airship, gave no clue about what the production car would look like. This was the Mitsubishi i, whose electric equivalent was sold as the i-MIEV and, with different badging, as the Citroën C-Zero and the Peugeot i0n.

The CS&S was one of six Toyota concepts displayed at the 37th Tokyo Motor Show in late 2003. It had broadly the same hybrid power system as the contemporary Prius, with an electric motor powering the front wheels and the 1.5-litre petrol engine driving the rears.

The CS&S was also notable in having a multifunction touchscreen – a far more futuristic idea back in 2003 than it is now.

The YCC (standing for Your Concept Car) was described by Volvo as being designed “by women for modern people”, a phrase which sounds very old-fashioned only two decades later. The all-female design team was determined to make the car as user-friendly as possible, with good visibility, a practical interior and several personalisation options. 

In one notably simple but ingenious example, the designers made it possible to fill up the windscreen washer bottle from the side of the body, since they saw no reason why anyone should have to open the bonnet just to do that.

The Efijy’s name is both a pun on the word ‘effigy’ and a reference to the 1950s Holden FJ. There are some visual similarities between the production car and the retro rod concept, but the Efijy was much more aggressive and a great deal faster.

It was based on a lengthened Chevrolet Corvette platform and powered by a supercharged 6.0-litre V8 engine producing around 640bhp, approximately the output of ten FJs.

Ford described the Reflex as proof that small cars ‘can be bold, American and innovative’. The innovation included finding space for three seats in a concept that looked like it could manage only two and powering it with a diesel-electric hybrid powertrain.

Other highlights included polished 20-inch alloy wheels, low roll-resistance Michelin tyres, a six-speed semi-automatic transmission with shift paddles and solar-powered exterior lights.

According to Saab, the Aero X was inspired partly by the company’s history in aircraft design. This was expressed partly in a cockpit canopy which had to be lifted up to let the occupants in and out, a possibly problematic situation if you were unfortunate enough to land rubber side up.

A twin-turbo engine fuelled by bioethanol was claimed to produce 400bhp, and the styling details hinted at a future design language. Sadly, not much came of this, because Saab lasted less than a decade after the Aero X made its appearance.

Created when electric cars were just starting to look as if they might be part of the motoring future, the Zero was a low-slung four-seater whose motor was claimed to be capable of providing a top speed of 130mph and a 0-60mph time of 5.7 seconds.

Dodge also said it had a range of 250 miles between charges, though of course this wouldn’t be possible at three-figure speeds.

The three Tang Hua electric concepts displayed at the 2008 Detroit Show all had a friendly look which were supposed to be indicative of Chinese culture.

The Book of Songs, perhaps the best-named of the trio, was also the most cartoon-like, but the Piece of Cloud and the amphibious Detroit Fish ran it close. They were all claimed to be suitable for tourist areas, large communities, university campuses and small towns, but the project doesn’t seem to have got much further.

Like the F 100 mentioned earlier, the ESF 2009, based on the contemporary S-Class, brought to public attention safety aids which would appear on production models in the near future.

Among these were seatbelt airbags, Pre-Safe collision avoidance, interactive vehicle communication and a night vision system.

This two-seat roadster had a lightweight chassis with a mid-mounted 2.0-litre diesel engine said to be capable of 65mpg on the then-current combined fuel economy cycle.

Apart from the diesel bit, it was similar to the Toyota MR2 and to some extent the Renault Sport Spider and Lotus Elise, all of which were available to the public, but VW made it clear right from the start that this was “a design study with no immediate plans for production”, and apparently no future plans either.

Longer than and Audi A8L and as wide as a Maybach, the Metropolis was a very large saloon, a type of car particularly popular in China. Power came from a petrol-electric hybrid drivetrain which included an electric motor and a 2.0-litre V6 engine. This was said to be as muscular as a non-hybrid 4.0-litre V8 but producing one fifth of the CO2 emissions.

The Metropolis was never put on sale, but the similar DS 9 entered the Chinese market in 2020.

GMC is best-known for its large trucks and SUVs, and rarely builds concept vehicles. It was therefore a surprise when the little Granite, powered by a 1.4-litre turbo petrol engine, was unveiled at the 2010 Detroit Show.

Rumours of a production version persisted for several years, but when GMC representative Mark Alger was asked in 2019 if the brand might put a similar small crossover on the market, he replied, “I’m going to give you a definite no on that one.” Nothing has happened since to suggest that the policy has changed.

The Pop was a radical electric city car with three seats, the one at the rear mounted at an angle to provide the maximum possible legroom in a vehicle measuring just three metres from end to end.

Kia didn’t pretend that this was a car of the current generation, or indeed the one after that, “but looks even further into the future”.

First displayed at the Seoul Motor Show, the Miray did not look like a sporty Chevrolet model, of the past, but it did have enough styling cues to make the point. Its powertrain was absolutely modern, consisting of a 1.5-litre petrol engine and two electric motors.

According to GM, the Miray “offers an exploration of future possibilities for the brand”, a coded phrase meaning, “We won’t be building it any time soon.”

Few concepts built by Citroën, or indeed anyone else, have been quite as odd as the Tubik. It was an MPV with nine seats and a design which made it look like a vastly extended (and very rounded) update of Citroën’s famous H Type van.

In 2017, the Tubik was one of 65 vehicles put up for auction at the Conservatoire Citroën collection on the outskirts of Paris, and found a buyer.

Saab’s final concept, revealed shortly after the company was sold to Spyker and named after a mythical bird which rose from the ashes of its predecessor, was based on a new platform intended for the next production 9-3 and had a 1.6-litre turbo petrol engine up front and an electric motor driving the rear wheels.

According to a statement issued at the time of the Geneva Show, ‘the future is already here’, but Saab didn’t have a future, and this time the ashes won.

The Code 130R was a proposal for a small, rear-wheel drive Chevrolet powered by a 1.4-litre turbo petrol producing something in the region of 150bhp.

It was well-received, and there was strong support for a production version. This never came about for several reasons, one of the most important reportedly being that GM would have had to develop a new platform to base it on.

‘Looking every centimetre a road-legal racer’ (according to Kia), the Provo was a sporty coupe/hatchback crossover with a proven 1.6-litre turbo petrol engine under the bonnet and an electric motor supplying further power to the rear wheels.

It would probably have been pretty quick, and it certainly had an arresting appearance, but there were concerns about selling a car of that name in Northern Ireland, for reasons we need not discuss here. The point was moot, though, since the Provo never made it to production.