What do you think the cars of the future will look like? Will we have flying cars? Maybe teleportation will eliminate basic transportation all together? If you asked that question back in the 80s, those were some future expectations. Flying cars at least!
Had you asked that question back in the 60s, well the answers may have been even further-fetched. According to the popular Jetsons cartoon, we are all supposed to be living in floating homes with robot maids by 2060. It is precisely these visions of the future that have driven the deigns of futurism in automobile design since the days of the Model A.
The truth of the matter is that automobile design hasn’t changed nearly as much as we had expected. Yes, performance and safety features have taken a giant leap and we now have electric cars and engineers are working around the clock to bring self-driving cars to market. The amazing thing is that these retro-future dreams were both ideas for concept cars of the 1940s and 50s.
The “Electric Egg” was cruising the streets of Paris back in 1942 and by 1956 GM had a self-driving concept car that was planned to be released by 1976! Scientists, car designers and civil engineers have been researching and discovering new ways to bring these dreams to reality for nearly a century and it is only today that some of these dreams are becoming a reality.
While not all the concepts shown in the infographic below (provided by TitleMax) have been actualized, it is still interesting to learn about what prior generations had hoped and dreamed would become a future reality. Can you imagine if the 1930 Dynasphere, the design from Leonardo Da Vinci, had become a success? How about the nuclear-powered Ford Nucleon?
Today, concept cars are based a little more on the confines of reality and maybe that is a good thing, maybe not. While electric and self-driving cars are finally becoming a part of today’s reality, I still want to see flying cars in my future.
