What Is The Point Of Concept Cars
For a long time now folks have been fascinated by what amazing vehicles can be discovered in motor shows across the world. The vehicles that are making people stop and take another glance are not usually the vehicles they end up driving, but instead are vehicles that the car builders have developed to woo the buyers, test reaction and feature future ideas, and naturally to try and make sure their name just a little more memorable then the next, these vehicles are called concept cars.
Concept cars started life during the late 1930s when Harley Earl, a General Motors designer, penned a car not for building, but purely to show how a car could be sometime in the future, that car was called the Buick Y Job.
Harley Earl continued to design and represent such vehicles all through his career with the concept car idea really catching hold during the 1950s. Obviously the cars that Earl and others put together were never designed to be manufactured, they were simply an example in what might be possible to achieve in a real car at some point in the years ahead.
Concept cars never get to production themselves, but they regularly contain features that one day do make it to manufactured models, and occasionally a complete car will be built that has clear common areas with the concept car that inspired it usually several years previously.
Given the freedom of not needing to be worried with safety aspects, fuel consumption levels , weight, practicality and cost of production, the concept car designer can literally allow his imagination to go crazy, and that is why we regularly see examples of concept cars that appear like they belong in a different era entirely and clearly will never be built as a road car.
Designs regularly have layouts that move away from traditional car designs, gullwing doors, unusual passenger layouts, abstract shapes and numerous other design features which are not to be found in typical production vehicles.
Plainly, concept cars are pretty much an imaginative take on what could be possible in car design, and lots of concept cars try to smudge the boundaries between what might be expected in a typical car we purchase in the forecourts and concept cars with impossibly unrealistic styling or functionality.
While the vast majority of concept cars never get close to being manufactured, there are of course the odd few examples that give something to what we see on our streets, and its the excitement of seeing something incredible looking, that in another time could be realistic, that ensures both concept car designers, and the buying fans, both totally hooked on concept cars. If you are interested in concept cars, find the most up to date concept car news right now.