Ron Kimball, courtesy of RM Sothebys
The Automotive Age dawned in the 1880s, replacing beasts of burden with gas-powered contraptions that became more elaborate as the subsequent decades passed. During the 20th century, the automobile assumed many roles, from unadorned transportation like Ford’s Model T, to luxury statements with names like Rolls-Royce and Mercedes. However it rolled, the industry strove to heighten the allure of the automobile with designs that captured the public’s imagination.
The promise of performance and speed was expressed through aerodynamic shapes that took lessons from a new aviation industry, and styling was often the most sellable feature about a car. Like the airplanes inspiring them, these cars looked fast, even standing still. Everyone, it seems, was imagining themselves behind the wheel of an automobile.
These 17 dream machines gave a glimpse of the future, whetting appetites by foretelling styling and technology trends. Some set new benchmarks for production, others were so outlandish that they could not possibly be more than a one-off, but each is responsible for a segment of the automotive DNA that continues to make up the most remarkable models currently on the market.
-
1914 Alfa Romeo 40-60 HP Castagna Aerodinamica
Image Credit: Azerhey/Wikimedia Commons Alfa Romeo’s Aerodinamica prototype was a radical concept in 1914. Its novel design was based on the Alfa 40-60 HP, a road and race car made between 1913 and 1922 by the marque that would eventually become Alfa Romeo. In an age when most cars resembled square buildings with wagon wheels attached, the Aerodinamica featured a teardrop form in an attempt to cheat the wind.
It was designed by Marco Ricotti of Carrozzeria Castagna, the Italian coachbuilder that built bodies for Alfa Romeo before World War II. The egg-shaped oddity was capable of reaching a top speed of 86 mph with an inline-four engine that developed a healthy-for-the-day 70 hp.
-
1930 Isotta Fraschiani Flying Star
Image Credit: Karissa Hosek, courtesy of RM Sotheby’s Italian coachbuilders such as Zagato cut their teeth designing aircraft, and incorporated aero principles into car designs for clients like Alfa Romeo and Lancia. Carrozzeria Touring of Milan was another influential coachbuilder, one who pioneered the Supperleggera principle of wrapping an aluminum skin over a lightweight steel skeleton, mounted atop a steel chassis.
Touring’s 1930/1931 Flying Star–bodied Isotta Fraschiani and Alfa Romeo were one-off styling exercises. Few cars of the era come close to being as elegant and refined as either. Painted pure white, they were monumental designs. The car shown here is a replica of the 1930 Isotta Fraschiani Flying Star. The meticulous recreation sold through RM Sotheby’s for $302,500 in 2017.
-
1933 Dymaxion
Image Credit: Underwood Archives/Getty Images Polymath Buckminster Fuller unveiled the outrageous Dymaxion at Chicago’s 1933/1934 World’s Fair. Its aerodynamic bodywork, designed by Fuller, Starling Burgess, and sculptor Isamu Noguchi, featured a fin and looked like nothing else ever made before it. It was powered by a rear-mounted V-8 engine that drove the front wheels. Steering with its single rear wheel, it was highly unstable at speed, one prototype even killing its driver. Fuller himself crashed another, and today, only one remains.
The Dymaxion expressed Fuller’s utopian vision that encompassed everything from geodesic domes to solar-generated electricity. I was once invited to a small dinner where “Bucky” explained another one of his creations, one that allowed an individual to enjoy a hot shower using a single glass of water. Talk about an imagination.
-
1934 Chrysler Airflow
Image Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images Built from 1934 to 1937, the Airflow was a proof of concept that became a full-fledged production car for Chrysler. It was also the first full-sized American car to emphasize streamlined design in pursuit of aerodynamic efficiency. Early wind-tunnel testing was performed by Chrysler designers with the cooperation of Orville Wright.
The Airflow’s unibody design—a novelty in an era when car bodies sat on a steel frame—made it lighter as well. Unfortunately, its unfamiliar looks were not embraced by the public, and so despite virtuous principles, the Airflow was a commercial failure. But it “coulda been a contender.”
-
1934 Tatra T77
Image Credit: Corey Escobar, courtesy of RM Sotheby’s Europe’s first aerodynamic production car was so far ahead of its time that history nearly passed it by. The Czechoslovakian marque Tatra produced some of the most aerodynamic of any road-going automobiles: Googling “lowest drag coefficient” reveals a list of strange automotive bedfellows, with the 2020 McLaren Speedtail at the top and the 1934 Tatra T77 seventh on the list, slipping in above the eighth-ranked Tesla Model S.
A total of only 249 examples of the Tatra 77 and 77a models were produced through 1938. Distinguished by a prominent tail fin extending from the nape of the rear window to the base of the rear bumper, the car suggests an automotive Dimetrodon. The Tatra is equally unusual under its aerodynamic skin, where beneath its rear decklid resides an air-cooled, 3.0-liter V-8 engine that makes 60 hp. In 2023, the car seen here was sold through RM Sotheby’s for $390,000.
-
1937 Talbot Lago 150-C SS “Teardrop” Coupé
Image Credit: Fotohalle Unger, courtesy of RM Sotheby’s The French have a way with design, articulated with a distinct vocabulary of their own. It’s a styling approach that’s all about elegance, whether it’s a Louis XV chair or Dior haute couture. In the case of the automobile, the epitome of the French aesthetic is arguably the Figoni et Falaschi–bodied Talbot-Lago T150-C SS “Teardrop” Coupé—an art deco masterpiece. It was a real performance car, too, powered by a 4.0-liter, inline-six engine.
From 1937 to 1939, Talbot-Lago built a limited number of T150-C SS chassis, which received custom bodies by a variety of coachbuilders, by far the most beautiful of which were designed and fabricated by Figoni et Falaschi, responsible for between 10 and 12 such examples. The car shown here sold for more than $3.6 million through RM Sotheby’s in 2017.
-
1938 Buick Y Job
Image Credit: GM Heritage Collection Harley Earl was the man whose styling vision charted the postwar growth of General Motors as the world’s leading automaker. As the company’s design boss in the 1930s, Earl was responsible for the 1938 Buick Y Job (penned by George Snyder), a vehicle considered by many to be the first concept car. Long, low, and with lots of chrome, it set the tone for the coming decade, one in which the American automotive industry would reign supreme.
Earl took his designs on the road, literally, with GM’s Parade of Progress, a series of science and technology shows transported in 12 Futureliners, enormous red buses resembling locomotives that stopped in dozens of towns across America. (One Futureliner was auctioned through Barrett-Jackson in 2006 for $4 million.) While the original Buick Y Job no longer exists, a replica reminds us that the one-off was one of the most important concept cars ever created.
-
1946 Stout Scarab
Image Credit: Jim Evans/Wikimedia Commons Arguably the world’s first minivan, the Scarab was created by the Stout Motorcar Company of Detroit, Mich. It was also the first so-called production car to feature a fiberglass body and air suspension. Its unibody structure placed a Ford V-8 engine in the rear, eliminating a driveshaft and allowing a flat floor for the interior.
Styled by Dutch automotive engineer John Tjaarda (whose son, Tom Tjaarda, was a notable designer for Ghia and Pininfarina), it resembles more an aircraft without wings than an automobile. About nine examples were built, including prototypes, and about five are believed to exist today.
-
1949 Saab 92
Image Credit: National Motor Museum/Heritage Images via Getty Images Saab was founded in 1937 as a manufacturer of military aircraft, and the Swedish company’s first production car was a curious, beetle-shaped coupe with a drag coefficient of just 0.30. It needed to be sleek and aerodynamically efficient, as it was powered by a two-stroke, water-cooled, twin-cylinder engine that made only 25 hp.
Novel, too, was its front-wheel-drive layout and monocoque chassis, as opposed to conventional body-on-frame construction at the time. Evidently, all the earliest Saab 92 cars were painted the same green, likely due to a surplus of paint in that color being available after World War II. About 20,000 examples were made over a period of six years. The car is shown here with a Saab 21 jet fighter.
-
1951 LeSabre
Image Credit: John Lloyd/Wikimedia Commons By far the most popular auto shows in history, GM’s Motoramas were extravagant events staged from 1949 to 1961 in New York and other major U.S. cities. Attracting more than 10 million visitors over the years, they entertained an eager public with not just new production models, but sensational Motorama concept cars.
Every year brought groundbreaking designs. Some, such as this fighter-jet-inspired 1951 LeSabre, forecast upcoming styling trends. Others, such as the Firebird I, II, and III—created from 1953 through 1958—were impractical dreams that looked like wingless aircraft and were propelled by jet engines. And then there was the 1964 Firebird IV, a concept that was, presciently, intended to be autonomous.
-
Alfa Romeo B.A.T. 5, 7, and 9 (1953, 1954, and 1955, respectively)
Image Credit: Ron Kimball, courtesy of RM Sothebys Gruppo Bertone pushed aerodynamic audacity with the Alfa Romeo B.A.T. 5, 7, and 9, the coachbuilder’s most important designs of the 1950s. The atelier’s penman was Franco Scaglione, a design visionary in the truest sense. Emerging in rapid succession for 1953, 1954, and 1955, the diminutive Alfas may, in fact, be the most recognizable concept cars of all time.
They were powered by Alfa’s 115 hp, 2.0-liter inline-four engine, built on a 1900 chassis. Without benefit of wind-tunnel testing, the B.A.T. 7, for instance, achieved a remarkable coefficient of drag that, at 0.19, undercuts the 0.24 Cd of a Tesla Model S or Toyota Prius today. In 2020, the three cars were sold as a set through RM Sotheby’s for $14.84 million.
-
1957 Chrysler Ghia Super Sport 400
Image Credit: Bonhams With the 1950s came the American-Italian dialogue between Chrysler’s Virgil Exner and Carrozzeria Ghia, a coachbuilder responsible for executing many concept cars for Chrysler as well as the era’s most exclusive luxury car, the Dual-Ghia, requisite attire for the Rat Pack and other notables.
Yet if any styling cue conjured dreams of the future, it was fins, and it was Exner who was their champion. His “Forward Look” led the charge, and his befinned Chrysler concepts caught GM off guard. The fin-wars escalated through 1961, when saner minds eventually prevailed. In 2023, this one-off 1957 Chrysler Ghia Super Sport 400 sold through Bonhams for $819,000.
-
1968 Alfa Romeo Carabo
Image Credit: Stefano Guidi/LightRocket via Getty Images The Alfa Romeo Carabo concept car, built on a Stradale 33 chassis, was designed by Marcello Gandini and unveiled at the 1968 Paris Motor Show. His designs for Bertone clients during this fertile period amounted to some of the most creative output in automotive history. His landmark production cars included the Lamborghini Miura and Countach, accompanied by even more far-afield concepts like the gullwing-door Lamborghini Marzal and Lancia Stratos Zero.
The Alfa Romeo project afforded an opportunity to explore the wicked wedge even further. The Carabo name is derived from a family of ground beetles called Carabidae, some of which are colored a brilliant metallic green and have striking orange edges on the hindwing covers—an aesthetic clearly carried over to the car.
-
1970 Ferrari 512S Modulo
Image Credit: Morio/Wikimedia Commons The most significant concept car of an otherwise difficult decade has got to be the Pininfarina-designed Ferrari 512S Modulo. Paolo Martin’s creation was as audacious as anything ever seen, and reiterated Italy’s role as the world’s arbiter of automotive taste and style. Marcello Gandini’s Lancia Stratos Zero, from the same year, wasn’t far behind.
With the 1970s, though, came looming safety regulations that would quickly dampen the spirits of designers, at least with production models comprising unforgiving bumper, lighting, and crumple-zone requirements. The oil crisis, prompting a 55 mph speed limit on stateside roads, drove another nail, and the rest of the 20th century saw few concept cars nearly as memorable.
-
1978 Vector W2
Image Credit: WWyss/Wikimedia Commons In 1978, an ambitious young Los Angeles designer named Gerald Weigert unveiled his Vector W2 prototype, a wedge-shaped assault weapon challenging the most radical inventions from Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche.
I recall seeing the prototype in his studio, which also had a maroon De Tomaso Mangusta parked in the corner as if inspiring the next generation of supercar. That Weigert’s company didn’t survive 1993 is a loss, as only a few Vectors were ever commercially produced. Coincidentally, Gordon Murray’s McLaren F1 took center stage in 1993 as the world’s most capable supercar.
Authors
-
Robert Ross
