I know there are designers who look down on the process of plundering the past for new design ideas, but I can’t help but love a good modern re-working of a retro design. Peugeot’s stylists must have found a Peugeot 504 Coupe in some storage garage and fell in love, because their new electric and autonomous concept…
Last-mile delivery is, apparently, the cause of a lot of traffic in urban areas. Living in New York City and having to constantly dodge around double-parked delivery trucks, I am inclined to agree. Renault’s solution to alleviate that is to implement a fleet of automated delivery pods.
Photos of a Formula One concept car for the 2021 season popped up on Twitter earlier this week, and, aside from the routine rules overhaul planned for that year, the photos had almost no context at all. But F1 stepped in a few hours ago to give us all the context we needed, and it turns out what we’re seeing is the…
For those of you who are deeply emotionally affected by horrible car design ideas, I’m sorry you have to see this Hyundai Santa Fe Cabriolet. I know if I could unsee it, I would.
What happens when a car designer for the Indy 500 falls in love with the sleek-bodied German race cars of the 1930s? You get the wildly dramatic street-legal roadster unlike one you’ve ever seen before. You get the 1948 Norman Timbs Special.
While the current Genesis sedans are good and fine cars on their own, I still want something bold and exciting in the lineup. Something like a production version of the Essentia concept that we saw last spring. And it seems like Genesis is thinking about bringing it to production. Emphasis on thinking.
Yesterday (or two days ago, or two lifetimes ago, it’s hard for me to tell since I’m in Europe and still jet-lagged) Volvo introduced an autonomous, electric concept car called the 360c that included “a special safety blanket” for when you were horizontal and sleeping. Come again?
There’s something pretty damn intoxicating about a vintage-looking car loaded with high-powered modern technology. Mercedes-Benz saw that appeal, so they took inspiration from their record-setting 1937 W 125, loaded it up with an electric powertrain, and pulled off the covers to drop some jaws at Pebble Beach.
I know that Infiniti’s Prototype 10 probably has an extremely slim chance of becoming real, but damn do I want it to manifest into a production version. It looks utterly remarkable. Single-seater! Perfect for misanthropes like me.
My friends all laughed when I told them my dream. They thought I meant a fantasy. I meant a goal: One day I would kidnap Dale Jr. in a multicolor car of my own, and we’d ride together until the end of days.
Infiniti, a luxury car brand that we have increasingly questioned the point of, admittedly does concepts well. Past design studies have been both retro and sleek and the automaker’s newest Prototype 10 concept car doesn’t seem like it will be any different.
The ‘70s were a neat time for cars. Everything was shaped like a door-stopper. Like the Maserati Khamsin. The BMW M1. The Lamborghini Countach. And the Ferrari 512S Modulo concept, which, excitingly, had its first drive ever on public roads today.
The car industry has few secrets, at least when it comes to car designs. Any dramatic new vehicle you see debut was usually previewed by a concept car a few years before. So if we know a mid-engine Corvette is due, there’s gotta be some concept car from a couple years back that previews it. And this might be the one.
The Toyota SF-R may have just been a concept when it debuted at the Tokyo Motor Show in 2015, but to us, it was more than that. It was a light, small, entry-level sports car that looked destined for production. Things looked promising. But now, three years later, there’s still no S-FR. What the hell?
Generally, when we think about automotive safety, it involves ways to not drive into people. The truth is, though, life isn’t perfect, and sometimes good people get driven into by cars. If you accept that this happens, you can then try to make a person’s car-impact experience as enjoyable as possible, and the results…
I found a copy of a great old book called Cars That Never Were in a used bookstore, behind a secret door marked with a pair of crossed pistons and reeking of old motor oil and decay. The book is full of interesting prototypes, but one caught my eye especially because of its novel design and engine choice. It’s a 1964…
If a magic horse were to come up to me today and tell me that if I pleasured them, physically, that horse would grant me a wish, I’d have my horse-pleasuring gloves on so fast your eyes would cross and the next thing you know there’d be one satisfied horse, a flash of bright blue light, and me, in 1990s Japan,…
When we look back at the post-WWII automotive designs pouring out of manufacturers, we probably would think of them as “modern” by today’s standards. But at the time, the industry was ready for something fresh, and engineers were ready to deliver. Tons of concept cars showcasing the future appeared at exhibitions…
Arguably one of the most incredible things about the 1950s was the insistence that we could absolutely use this potentially deadly technology in the most wholesome ways to create a really cool car.
There’s something undeniably quaint about the way the industrialized world imagined the future back in the 1950s. Looking at it now, you think less “future” and more “aww, look how retro!” And nothing epitomizes that more than the Astra-Gnome.
