Concept Cars Gone Bad
Sheet-metal creations that should never roll off a production line.
By Sam Foley of MSN Autos

EN-V Xiao concept from General Motors
We're in favor of creative experimentation, especially in the automotive world, where entrenched, sclerotic bureaucracies often create a culture that trends toward the formulaic when it comes to vehicle design. The design-by-committee philosophy often practiced in this staid system has produced cars as flavorless as the Cadillac Cimarron and as audaciously stupid as the Pontiac Aztek. But it's also produced many winners. While determining the success or failure of a vehicle is, as one can imagine, not an exact science, the creation of concept cars helps to determine what works and what, well, doesn't.

To show off their creative chops at car shows, automobile companies routinely set their design departments free to follow their creative instincts and prove an aesthetic point about an automaker's direction. We call their creations concept cars. The history of the concept car dates back to the late 1930s, when legendary General Motors designer Harley Earl created the Buick Y-Job, a gorgeous expression of one man's love for fenders. The Y-Job would influence Buick styling for years to come, and it also launched a polite competition of ideas among automakers that would result in concepts as outlandish as the 1958 Ford Nucleon — which, as the name suggests, was designed to be a nuclear-powered vehicle — and as iconic as the GM XP-755 Mako Shark.

Bing: GM Mako Shark

Neither the Nucleon or the Mako Shark were true success stories; i.e., both were never produced. But that doesn't mean they were failures either. Concepts let automakers test designs without taking a huge financial gamble on a full production car. For instance, the enormously popular Mako Shark might not have seen the lights of a showroom, but it directly influenced the design of the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray, a sheet-metal icon.

But for every concept that makes a big splash with the public, there are others that go horribly, horribly wrong. This article celebrates the latter, the concept cars destined to become future train wrecks. While all of the vehicles featured here were meant to show off a company's creative IQ, they in fact sent the auto-show-going public into paroxysms of disgust or fits of eyebrow-arching perplexity. Our role is not to chide the automakers' design teams for trying something new, only to let them know what their friends and colleagues probably won't — that the car they've worked so hard on is a failure. And that it's time to try something new.