The Lost Concept Car Edition

On innovation, iteration, and the future

Ryan McManus (RMM) is a longtime friend of WITI, dating back to our time together at The Barbarian Group. He currently runs Competitive Intelligence & Special Strategic Studies at Ford Motor Company. His previous installments explored dazzle camouflage, low-number license plate lotteries, and the end of spare parts.

Ryan here. What is the value of a dream, once dreamt? If you frequent the automotive corners of the internet, you may have come across a peculiar article this past week: An intensely futuristic, egg-shaped vehicle was found sitting out back of a local recycling plant in Atlanta. This wasn’t a time-traveling mission gone awry—it turned out to be the Mercedes Benz MBUX POD, originally created to showcase the interior of a yet-to-be-revealed S-Class back in 2020. How the hell did it end up here?

Why is this Interesting?

The MBUX POD is what is called a concept car. Considering the pod itself has no wheels and is only vaguely automotive in shape, you begin to understand that the definition of “concept car” can be quite broad. 

Starting in 1938 with the Buick Y-Job, the concept car as a practice served several purposes: Some were built to showcase an idea of where an automaker was going, stylistically (and to judge early public reaction to that direction). Some were built to showcase potential new technologies, like the Ford Nucleon (nuclear powered, or so they intended). Others were built as proofs-of-concept for feats of aerodynamics, like the Alfa Romeo BAT. 

Concept cars also can be built to very different levels of fidelity. Some are literally painted clay models, with no interior, hidden behind blacked-out windows. Others, like Marc Newson’s Ford 021C, are built with full interior and exteriors, but no working mechanicals (sometimes called “rollers”). Concept cars like the GM Futurliner might however be operational vehicles, hand-built in obscenely low numbers at an obscenely high cost as a statement that can be driven and displayed. And some, rarely, were built to showcase a specific feature of an upcoming vehicle without giving the entire game away, like our lost little Mercedes MBUX POD. 

The one thing all concept cars have in common? None are built to last, not really. They are exorbitantly expensive sculptures, crafted by automakers to describe a dream, and to hopefully inspire that dream in the public eye. 

And then, the dream passes.

So what happens after that? 

Back to Atlanta, and our odd-shaped egg pod car. How could a multi-million dollar, highly proprietary concept car that likely took thousands of hours to produce end up unceremoniously dumped in a junkyard? The answer is brutally simple: Once a concept car has served its purpose, has been shown and toured and evaluated and been the darling of the auto show circuit, its time is up. Some concept cars might, in fact, represent the greatest automotive depreciation story of all time —even more than Maserati. They go from 1 of 1, multimillion dollar rarities to worth their weight in scrap.

I hear you, reader! I know right now some of you are saying: “Surely there is some archival value? Surely they should be preserved in some way by the automakers or collectors? They belong in a museum!”

And yes, some are preserved, rescued by museums or kept in automaker collections.. That GM Futurliner I mentioned above? One of them is now owned by a private party, Peter Pan bus lines, where it still makes public appearances (including mysteriously ending up on suburban Massachusetts streets). Some unfortunately also do go missing, lost entirely to time like the Bertone-designed Mustang. 

One notable preservationist is Phillip Sarofim, who owns and drives several iconic concept cars, including the outrageous Lancia Stratos Zero. Talking to him, it became clear how delicate an act it is to keep these vehicles on the road and in the public eye:

“Owning and maintaining a concept car like the Zero or Aston Martin Bulldog is very different,” Phillip explains. “You truly feel the weight of your role as custodian because you have to balance the importance of ensuring the cars can be seen and enjoyed by as many people as possible while also doing everything possible to make sure they remain extremely well preserved for future generations.”

When something inevitably breaks, that custodial role comes at a real cost. “Recently it took us 6 months to replace an air vent on a concept car,” Phillip added. “After huge amounts of research and comparisons we simply could not find out what car the vent came from so we had to remanufacture the part from scratch so that it is absolutely correct.”

In the end, these lucky few survivors are the exceptions—on balance, most concept cars are scrapped, shredded, junked and forgotten. Their dream, if they are successful, becomes part of a mass-produced vehicle’s reality, remembered only by the  generation that witnessed them and agreed it was a dream they wanted to build upon. (RMM)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN)

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