Prototypes that promised the future and never left the showroom.
GM XP-500: The 1956 Dream Car With No Crankshaft That Could Run on Peanut Oil The most radical engine General Motors ever put in a car didn’t have a crankshaft, didn’t have connecting rods, and had been run on whale oil in the lab. GM installed it in a bubble-topped two-seater called the XP-500, showed … Read more
Alfa Romeo Canguro: The Contest Nobody Won The most beautiful Alfa Romeo ever drawn exists because of a General Motors executive in Detroit. Not directly. But the method that produced it was Bill Mitchell’s, and Alfa Romeo copied it a year later, right down to the two coachbuilders and the two donor chassis. Both experiments … Read more
Lamborghini Portofino: Four Scissor Doors, Frankfurt 1987 If you drove a first-generation Dodge Intrepid, you drove the face of a Lamborghini. Chrysler built 645,281 of them between 1993 and 1997, and the nose on all of them traces back to a four-door Lamborghini prototype that was shown exactly once. The car is the Portofino, unveiled … Read more
Lamborghini Athon: 260 HP, No Roof, Turin 1980 Bertone brought a brand-new Lamborghini to the Turin motor show in April 1980. An open two-seater, futuristic, with a fully digital instrument panel and a single-spoke steering wheel. Lamborghini had been bankrupt for two years. A coachbuilder publicly unveiled a car for a client that was in … Read more
Lamborghini Bravo: 300 HP and 2,390 lb in 1974 A show car does not get driven. It is pushed onto the stand, lit, photographed and put away. The Lamborghini Bravo covered tens of thousands of test kilometers. American journalists drove it and published a verdict. And in April 1978, three and a half years after … Read more
Fiat Turbina: The Jet-Age Prototype America Never Heard Of Ask an American gearhead about turbine-powered cars and you’ll get one answer: the Chrysler Turbine Car, the bronze coupe Chrysler loaned out to ordinary families in 1963 as a rolling experiment. What most of them don’t know is that nine years earlier, an Italian engineering team … Read more
Alfa Romeo Diva: The Prototype Alfa Wouldn’t Sign In 2006, while Alfa Romeo was preparing to return to the American market with a quarter-million-dollar grand tourer, it took a 1,100 kg mid-engined two-seater to the Geneva Motor Show and parked it in a Swiss design school’s booth. Among student projects. With the doors shut for … Read more
Bertone Testudo: Two Months and a Kid Every enthusiast knows the Chevrolet Corvair as America’s cautionary tale — the rear-engined oddball that ended up as the poster child for automotive controversy, the car that became shorthand for Detroit getting it wrong. What almost nobody knows is that the same car, in the hands of a … Read more
Ferrari Pinin: The Car That Proved Enzo Didn’t Run Ferrari We take one thing for granted that simply isn’t true: that Enzo Ferrari did whatever he pleased at Ferrari. The old man, the patriarch, sole master of the Prancing Horse, deciding by decree what got built and what didn’t. Well, there was one car — … Read more
Dymaxion Car: Brilliant and Forgotten Walter Chrysler wanted in. Henry Ford wanted in. Henry Kaiser wanted in. Three of the biggest names in American manufacturing looked at Buckminster Fuller’s three-wheeled aluminium teardrop and reached the same conclusion: this thing changes everything. Ford offered him anything in the catalogue at seventy-five percent off. Chrysler believed it … Read more
Lancia Sibilo: Gandini’s last wedge, a Stratos in alien clothing Picture this. Turin Motor Show, April 1978. The car industry is five years deep into a hangover that just won’t lift. The 1973 oil crisis has rewired everything. Big cars don’t sell anymore. Safety regulations are forcing designers to bolt rubber bumpers onto everything like … Read more
The first journalist to drive it was also the last Bill Thomas didn’t know he was making history. Nobody at Bentwaters Park on August 19th, 2008 thought they were making history. They thought they were making a magazine feature. Top Gear had arranged a photo shoot with Mazda’s Furai concept at the former RAF airbase … Read more
