Top 5 Futuristic Car Concepts

A concept car is a prototype that showcases a new concept, style or technology. They are often shown at motor shows to guage customer reaction to radical new ideas. Concept cars never go into production directly, as often they are inteded to ’show off’ what a company can do. The first ever concept car was the Buick Y-Job in 1938, however since then, technology and innovation has changed dramatically. Here are 5 of some of the most innovative concept cars in recent times.

5) Peugeot Flux

The Flux is a compact vehicle (3500 mm long, 1650 mm wide) created to be fun to drive and to please its occupants, thanks to the open cockpit, the dynamic character and the integrated X-Box console.

The name Flux was inspired by the continuous change and flow of our daily lives during work and play. The shape also represents this flow with transitions between hard and smooth lines, straight and curved all of which are typical Peugeot’s styling cues.

The hood and side body panels are made from plastics; seatsare in polyurethane and the mechanical parts are made of aluminium. The main components such as the chassis and head protection are metal.

4) BMW ZX-6

BMW ZX-6 car concept came from the 3rd year students of Transportation Design School at Turin Based IED (Istituto Europeo di Design) for final project of Transportation Design (Designing the BMW of 2015) which is designed in partnership with BMW.

The concept is focused keeping in mind the modern needs, tastes and life style of an individual. All the cars designed in this project looks like toy cars. You cannot even imagine them running on roads in the real life.

3)Audi Locus

Turkish designer Ugur Sahin descirbed the main feature of the car as “the way its surface shapes are formed with continous flow”. He also comments that he was inspired by nature, in that there are no straight lines in nature. Its most outstanding features is the roof, which combines the windshield and the rear window into one continous glass surface. In Sahin’s words, he wanted to create a car that “creates a relaxing, energetic, vibrant and confident feeling”.

2) Audi RSQ Concept

Audi Design developed the RSQ for the futuristic film ‘I, robot’. In a masterpiece of product placement the RSQ generated almost as much interest as the film itself.

The Audi RSQ sport coupe was a future interpretation of Audi’s typical design language.

For the RSQ’s creators the most important aspect of the design was that despite its extreme forward thinking the car should still be firmly recognisable as an Audi.

Interestingly the RSQ concept rides on spherical wheels giving it instantaneous movement in any direction, similar the ball in a computer mouse.

1) BMW Gina

BMW is really thinking outside the proverbial box with their latest concept design exercise. If the previously featured M1 concept did not strike your fancy, maybe this GINA Light Visionary Model will do the trick. The GINA is a roadster concept wherein the use of sheet metal found on bodies of production vehicles has been replaced with a special, flexible, highly durable and extremely expansion-resistant fabric material that stretches across a metal structure.

Unlike traditional cars, various aspects of the bodies substructure are moveable and can be shifted by means of electro-hydraulic controls, changing the shape of the outer skin and overall design. One interesting example of this feature, becomes apparent in the headlight arrangement. When the headlights are not active they are hidden under the special fabric cover, as soon as the driver turns on the lights, the contour of the front ends changes revealing the headlights, looking a lot like a character out of the Pixar movie “Cars”.

The whole point of this exercise is to prove that rigid body panels (as they are today) are not a necessary design element and do not significantly improve the overall safety of the automobile. Most crumple zones are 100% dependent on good frame design and materials.