On this year’s auto-show circuit, automakers and suppliers are displaying their most recent concept vehicles.
The Acura RD-X, done for the sake of young urbanites, had four doors in wide-open, no-B-pillar configuration and a power rear door in which glass panels open in the middle and curve around the taillights. Rearview cameras on front fenders replace outside mirrors.
Michael Wiedeman from Honda’s Torrance, Calif., design team is quick to say that the RD-X is purely a concept. There are no plans to produce the little drive-by-wire sedan, which features a 2.4-liter, 200-horsepower engine that can get an extra 50 horsepower from two rear-wheel electric engines.
At the Michelin Tire stand at the Detroit Auto Show, three concepts from Italian design houses glistened atop their Michelin footwear. The most unusual was the Bertone Filo sedan with its drive- and brake-by-wire technology (there is no shaft-mounted steering wheels or pedals for the driver), 21st Century seating and room for four.
Bertone spokesman Daniel Cornil said the vehicle gives the user the impression of handling an aircraft rather than a road vehicle.
The “steering wheel” folds down in front of the driver from its mid-cabin location. The driver accelerates and brakes by twisting or squeezing its grips. There is a removable wireless phone in the steering wheel the driver can carry to keep in touch with the vehicle.
Concept vehicles, the sometimes outrageous but always interesting “idea” cars and trucks, are an automakers’ way of giving us a peek at the future. They are said to embody performance, communication, comfort and/or styling features that soon will make the leap from fiction to fact. But is that true?
Veteran Chrysler designer Jeff Godshall sniffs at the idea of a joystick–or even two levers or rudders–replacing the steering wheel.
“We’ve seen these ideas for years on concept cars,” he said. “The steering wheel can’t be replaced.” Drivers won’t make the leap of faith, he said.
Another feature that intrigues designers and frustrates realists are cameras replacing mirrors.
“The mid-’50s Buick Centurion concept had a chrome bullet tail with a TV camera,” he said. A half-century later cars still use mirrors.
Godshall pointed to the idea of changeable bodies. There have been concepts on which one could unscrew one passenger compartment and replace it with another style.
Hasn’t happened, but General Motors’ AUTOnomy, a futuristic platform unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show and touted as revolutionary, leans on the idea of fastening different tops to a 6-inch-thick base.
Chrysler spokesman Sjoerd Dijkstra acknowledged that the corporation’s Voyager III from the 1980s probably won’t see the light of day.
“This was a commuter vehicle attached to a kind of minivan,” Dijkstra said. “It had a total of six wheels, but the small commuter could be driven separately as a two-person car.”
The car-in-a-car had three axles, he said, and fit together in a fifth-wheel configuration like that used by large pickups to haul camper trailers.
Last year, Ford came up with an outdoorsman’s Explorer with large tub in which to hold the catch of the day. Again, a nifty idea but unlikely in significant numbers.
Fantastic styling exercises go farther back. There was a three-eighths-scale Seattle-ite XXI built by Ford for the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. The arrow-like vehicle had a bubble top, gull-wing doors and six wheels–four in front and two in the rear. According to author John Heilig, it was designed to run on compact nuclear propulsion devices.
GM’s Firebird I (1954) used gas turbine technology and had room for only a driver. Firebird II (1956) expanded its greenhouse to accommodate four, and Firebird III (1958) was a two-seater with Plexiglass bubbles and a joystick for steering, accelerating and braking.
“Anytime passengers are surrounded by [so much] glass, there are going to be comfort problems,” Godshall said.
Nuclear propulsion, bubble tops, handleless doors that open vertically and six wheels aside, concept or show cars have been the basis for most of the best vehicle features.
Concept cars are “extraordinarily valuable,” said Dick Ruzzin, retired Cadillac design chief now living in Grosse Pointe, Mich. “They offer an opportunity for new ideas to be expressed.”
They stretch the imaginations of designers and engineers and prompt them to say, “maybe we can do that,” he said.
With modern technology, different design and building tasks can be done at once, squeezing the process down and allowing an idea car to go into production faster than in the past.
Using existing platforms expedites the transition from concept to reality and cuts costs, he said.
According to Ruzzin, drive-by-wire or electronics-based controls appearing on show cars will have a huge effect on future interior design, he said.
They are for real, he said.
