And so you don’t forget them, here is a collection of what we consider to be the greatest concept cars of the decade. The Jet Age was upon us, and the carmakers were not about to let us forget it. Designers and engineers experimented with wild styling, clever features, and new solutions to old problems, some of which worked and some of which didn’t. With jet planes and research rockets soaring above us, not even the sky was the limit anymore.įew objects of any sort embodied the spirit, the extravagance, and the confidence of 1950s America as well as the concept, or “idea,” cars displayed at the country’s auto shows and, in some cases, on its roads. At the same time, inventions, pop culture, and technological innovations touched our lives in new ways, from the Space Race and the credit card to the Barbie doll and beyond. The modest shell that was the Atmos is the merest physical expression of a future that could contain such wonders.In the 1950s, the American economy was booming, the suburbs were sprawling, and automobiles took on newfound importance. Imagine Jack Kirby teaming with Jim Steranko to produce a car of the future. With nacelles on top of nacelles under tail fins with their own nacelles, everything about the drawing screams the 50s' motto of "too much is never enough." Still modern, even futuristic, today, this image is one of the few pure examples of a comic book future in an era when the Batmobile was a lumbering tank. has an image credited to Ford without any further information although it also seems to date from 1954. The absolute ultimate pluperfect example of the concept, shown in the center of this page, never became public. They pumped out a series of concept cars in the 1950s that slavishly included variations on the basic nacelle+fins ideal, none more so than the FX-Atmos, FX standing for Future Experimental, the Atmos "subtly" indicating atomic power, although the shell debuted at the 1954 Chicago Auto Show had no powertrain at all. Nobody loved this body styling more than the designers at Ford. Sarah Schleuning notes in Dream Cars that when GM surveyed consumers it found that "it was the appearance of speed that mattered most to the consumer rather than actual speed performance." These machines looked fast while sitting still. The type of craft didn't matter much - you'll find proposed flying cars, regular cars, hover cars, and aircraft below - but all are some variation on twin nacelles (a tubelike casing for a rocket engine), a clear bubbletop for the passengers, tail fins, and Dagmars (conical breastlike extrusions). From the end of WWII through the end of the 1950s that style combined the two most iconic avatars of modernistic speed - the jet plane and the rocket. Those representative styles were often from artists borrowing from one another, taking items that screamed Future to contemporary eyes and incorporating them into their own designs. Either they come from a handful of iconic images that transcend time or else they are built up from a style that was applied over and over again until it left us no other way to think. The visuals we keep in our heads of the Consensus Future are too consistent to be random memories.
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