BACK TO THE FUTURE

THE FIRST CONCEPT CARS

Cars of the future inevitably aren’t. They’re very much rooted in the eras when they were made, and while some were packed with clever ideas that subsequently became commonplace, other so-called concept cars are barking mad, or never worked properly because the technology and materials needed for them to become mainstream weren’t around.

Take the Dymaxion of 1933. Created by the American architect, inventor and philosopher Richard ‘Bucky’ Buckminster Fuller, the man behind ‘geodesic’ structures, his car looked like an airship gondola, could seat 11 people, topped 128mph, was about twice as fuel-efficient as contemporary designs of the time, and was able to turn in its own length. ‘It could dance very beautifully’, said Bucky.

It did this thanks to being steered by a single rear wheel (the two at the front were fixed) but this, coupled with a powerful Ford V8 engine, fairly limited knowledge about aerodynamics, a body of light alloy and balsa wood, and a canvas roof, meant that when one crashed, a passenger was killed and the Dymaxion car project died with him.

If Buckminster Fuller’s creation was the product of engineering purism, then the sinister-looking 1938 Phantom Corsair exists thanks to baked beans and a fertile imagination.

The brains behind it belonged to Rust Heinz, a member of the family that gave the world 57 varieties of tinned food. Despite not having any experience designing cars, he produced a prototype and persuaded an aunt to fund his huge, black, six-seater coupé whose styling mixed art deco with science fiction and looked like a cockroach. Capable of a then-impressive 115mph, the Phantom Corsair had front-drive, a 4.7-litre V8, push-button automatic doors, aircraft-like instruments and roof-mounted control switches. Advertised in Esquire magazine and promoted as ‘the car of tomorrow’, it appeared in a film called The Young in Heart as ‘the Flying Wombat’, alongside Douglas Fairbanks Junior. He – along with everyone else – resisted the temptation to buy one, and this extraordinary machine remained a one off. Heinz was only 25 when he died in a car accident.

TUCKER’S TORPEDO

In 1946 automobile engineer Preston T Tucker of Ypsilanti, Michigan, came up with the Tucker Torpedo saloon. It had a ‘flat six’ engine in the back (a bit like a Porsche), developed from a motor designed to power Bell helicopters, a front-passenger crash compartment, a steering system designed to avoid impaling the driver, a padded dashboard, and three headlights with the one in the middle that swivelled with the front wheels – although wings that did the same and a central steering wheel were abandoned.

The 120mph cars really were ahead of their time but only around 50 were ever made. Tucker was accused of fraud and became embroiled in a lengthy court battle (which he won), blaming the big American carmakers for stitching him up. But by then the Torpedo had been sunk.

THE MOTORAMA

Tucker’s hated rivals spent much of the 1950s coming up with outlandish ‘future car’ concepts of their own, many of which were inspired by jet-fighter aircraft and featured a panoply of fins and air ducts.

General Motors styling boss Harley Earl made up for frequent lapses of taste with a childlike sense of fun, creating cars that often looked as if they belonged in a science-fiction B movie. Many debuted at travelling shows called Motoramas, which ran from 1949 to 1961. The 1953 event at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel attracted 300,000-plus visitors. Its star turn was a concept sports car with a fibreglass body called the Corvette, which GM would later build as a Chevrolet.

Earl’s futuristic creations included the turbine-powered 1958 Firebird III, which looked like an aircraft fuselage shorn of its big wings but retaining several small ones guaranteed to cut pedestrians in half. Its two occupants had their own bubble canopies that could be raised using a ‘sonic’ key. A joystick-controlled the car and, even more alarmingly, it could drive itself using radio signals from sensors buried in the tarmac of GM’s test track. On a normal road it would presumably head for the nearest pylon.

Not to be outdone, Ford presented a scale model concept car called the Nucleon which, you’ve guessed it, would have been nuclear-powered. Fortunately, this car never got to the working prototype or crash-testing stage.

SCI-FI SUPERCARS

Generally, concept cars from the 1960s and 1970s looked a bit like mash-ups of spaceships and Ferraris. Italian vehicle design houses like Pininfarina and Bertone churned out very low, very wide and often entirely impractical supercars. Some of them looked fabulous but were wilfully impractical, such as the 1970 Ferrari 512 S Modulo which was so low to the ground that the only means of getting in and out was via an entire roof section that slid forward over the bonnet. It was described by its creator Paolo Martin as ‘the craziest dream car in the world, the most unique, violent, inimitable and conceptually different.’ He got that right. Meanwhile, Italian designer Giorgio Guigiaro was about to unveil the Lotus Esprit ‘dream car’ at the 1972 Turin Motor Show, which actually made it on to the production line and later earned fame as the amphibian Bond car in the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me.

THE UTILITARIAN LOOK

The thinking behind some more recent concept cars is harder to fathom. Take the Rhombus, created by China’s Changfeng College of Automotive Engineering. Its body appears to have been designed by a chimpanzee with a set square – all hard edges and straight lines. But even this can’t distract from the fact that it has one wheel at the front, one at the back and two in the middle.

From the ridiculous to the sublime, some cars of the future do actually get built.

At least the Nissan Round Box had a wheel at each corner, but it also had a nose resembling an industrial vacuum cleaner and a tall, upright body apparently modelled on a Portaloo.

The Round Box is a vehicular oil painting compared to Honda’s Fuya-Jo city car concept. Imagine an obese Dalek, shorn of its sink plungers but with sofa castors attached to each corner, and glazed with slit-like windows. Four occupants could squeeze in but almost had to stand up, but that’s okay because the interior was set up like a mobile disco, right down to a steering wheel shaped like a DJ’s turntable. Honda described its top-heavy creation, which appeared at motor shows for three years, as ‘a party-on-wheels concept’, one that presumably didn’t include a built-in toilet for embarrassed guests to hide in.

ONE THAT WORKED

From the ridiculous to the sublime, some cars of the future do actually get built. Take the Citroën DS, which appeared way back in 1955 and had wind-cheating, tapering bodywork with a beaky front that either looked like a piece of mobile sculpture or General de Gaulle’s nose. This otherworldly car appeared and caused a huge sensation in a grey, austere world that was still cleaning up after the war.

The car, which later gained headlamps that swivelled round corners, was so ahead of its time that it took Citroën 21 years to get round to replacing it.

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

This brings the bluffer to how real cars might really look in the future. Will they be little electric boxes, or emissions-free and hydrogen-powered? The short answer is that nobody really knows, so you can say pretty much whatever you want. Although electric cars can go further and faster than they used to, they still can’t go as far as fossil-fuelled ones, which take minutes to refuel. Electric vehicles need hours to get fully charged and, if they do become popular, vast sums of money will be needed to rip up streets and put in the requisite cables and charging points.

And if they become commonplace, will men of a certain age stop talking about 0-to-62 times and mutter darkly about ‘range anxiety’, a term for how far an electric car’s owner thinks it will get before coasting to a halt? This won’t be very far if they dare to use juice-sapping luxuries like heaters, air-conditioning units and headlights.

Then there’s the imponderable question of where all the electricity that will power these cars is going to come from. Will it just mean more gas and coal-fired power stations, or will electric cars have wind turbines on their roofs?

Some answers will need to be found very quickly, because every car manufacturer reckons that there will be a market for electric cars in the near future, particularly for city dwellers who might choose not to own them at all but instead hire them out from ranks as sort of pay-as-you-go cars like so-called ‘Boris Bikes’.

ALTERNATIVE ENERGY

Bluffers will always be on safe ground by saying that it’s only a matter of time before electric cars are the rule rather than the exception. Remember the early days of mobile phones, you will point out, when batteries were the size of houses and took 24 hours to charge, offering talk time of about two minutes? It didn’t take too long to sort that out.

And what about hydrogen fuel-cell cars? The ones with electric motors whose batteries are charged by a sort of chemistry set involving hydrogen and oxygen going through a complex, entirely incomprehensible process (which only works under tremendous pressure) to produce electricity, and a lot of heat – partly explaining why the systems involved are so expensive. Making them safe and small enough to work in cars has proved difficult, but it’s happening. Making a profit from them is proving tougher still, but you will knowledgeably point out that since the only emission that fuel-cell cars will produce is water vapour, it’s understandable that so much energy is being put into refining the technology.

Meanwhile, carmakers are finding ways of refining petrol and diesel engines to eke out the fuel they use and reduce the muck they produce, so they’re likely to be around for some time yet, perhaps in hybrid cars that also have batteries and electric motors to share or take over the workload. Some, called ‘plug-in’ hybrids, can be connected up to the National Grid and will act as electric cars until they’re in need of a recharge, after which conventional engines will do the work.

Of course, batteries, motors and other electrical gubbins take up space and add weight, which is another head-scratcher for car designers. So, like people, tomorrow’s cars will be battling with their weight and they’ll come in all shapes and sizes. Whatever their automotive power, you can bet that, like people, there will also be a lot more of them.