50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
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50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: 50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
#2Pinktentacle is still around?!
Re: 50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
#3Reminds me very much of the early days of Japanese import cars, where you'd hear the talking point both from Japanese spokespeople and reporters, "Japan is great at copying western products".
Nobody says that today, do they?
But these concept cares are really interesting! I see a lot of cars where at first glance I clock the car as a BMW M1, or a De Tomaso Pantera. Stick a huge wing on the Daihatsu TA-X80, and you could pass it off as a cheap Zonda.
Re: 50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
#4What seems always striking when looking at old concept cars is how many of them still have that "wow, I would totally drive that today, AND it would still look futuristic" quality.
Geez car companies, show some guts. Build some of those and put them on the road. No new car today gets anyone I know excited, but some of those old photos do.
Re: 50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
#5The Nissan Figaro has a lot of personality. Very FIAT like! I could see it being popular as an urban lifestyle car, similar to the BMW Mini.
Re: 50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
#6What seems always striking when looking at old concept cars is how many of them still have that "wow, I would totally drive that today, AND it would still look futuristic" quality. Geez car companies, show some guts. Build some of those and put them on the road. No new car today gets anyone I know excited, but some of those old photos do.
One big reason why cars look similar and alike are regulations. This is also a reason why SUVs get bigger and bigger - 2nd order effects of coupling permitted mileage to vehicle area. I'm wondering whether we'll get rid of obsolete regulations once cars are majority electric and have working accident-avoidance algorithms. I suspect not.
Re: 50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
#7> Isuzu Super Heavy Dumptruck
Epic
Re: 50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
#8The Nissan Figaro has a lot of personality. Very FIAT like! I could see it being popular as an urban lifestyle car, similar to the BMW Mini.
Yes, it has quite a cult following.
The production vehicle is almost identical to the concept car! Much closer than anything else on the list that I recognized
Re: 50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
#9One very cool Japanese concept car that isn't in that list is the Isuzu VehiCROSS. It was built as a concept car (Isuzu VX), and then was pushed fairly quickly to production.
One of the choices they made to speed it to production was to uses ceramic body panel molds; quicker and easier to create than steel molds, but they wear out quicker. The life of the production and replacement parts was limited by the life of these molds.
The VehiCROSS, IMHO, was a pretty cool looking production car. And the concept they had for the topless version, VX-O2, was also super cool looking (aside: unlike the Nissan Murano which I loved the look of but the topless version I thought was one of the ugliest cars ever).
Re: 50+ years of Japanese concept cars (2010)
#10What seems always striking when looking at old concept cars is how many of them still have that "wow, I would totally drive that today, AND it would still look futuristic" quality. Geez car companies, show some guts. Build some of those and put them on the road. No new car today gets anyone I know excited, but some of those old photos do.
One big reason why cars look similar and alike are regulations. This is also a reason why SUVs get bigger and bigger - 2nd order effects of coupling permitted mileage to vehicle area. I'm wondering whether we'll get rid of obsolete regulations once cars are majority electric and have working accident-avoidance algorithms. I suspect not.
Also just the reality of assembly lines. They prefer parts that can work on multiple models, fit existing machinery/process/chassis, etc... concept cars are one-off hand-built showpieces.