While thumbing through a recent (read: a year old or thereabouts) issue of Car and Driver at a doctor’s office the other day, I read an article that went something like this:
“Behold the Toyota MindFuck XST®, unveiled at the Munich Auto Show. Witness its sleek styling, its jet cockpit-like control panel, and its Holy-Mother-of-God sound system. Toyota has no plans to actually produce this car, so consumers will just have to jones.” [accompanying photo]
WTF???
Toyota poured untold billions of yen into researching, designing and building a prototype of this car, which has some consumers salivating. But they’re not going to actually build or sell it.
I understand that manufacturers have been building concept cars for decades, but I still don’t see the point. Why spend the money developing something that you have no intention of selling? Is this just the manufacturer’s way of saying “This is what we’re capable of!”?
Firstly, nothing wrong with a bit of decadence in the car game, gets you lots of publicity.
Its similar to those utterly ridiculous and unwearable designs you see on fashion models.
The cost of a concept car is small compared to the cost of advertising worldwide.
They might have spent huge sums, but they may not as well.
The biggest cost is in the tooling rather than the design, it might entail the construction of one or more complete new plants to produce it.
Concept cars are a one off, but most manufacturers do not make such cars, usually you will see a family resemblance between models, and this allows commonisation of parts across them to get costs down.
Concept cars may look good but usually it is impossible to implement such a dseign in mass production.
They do provide lots of feedback for the company, which can than use this to implement certain features in future models.
Pretty much it - they’ll gather responses and and include some of the well-received design details and technology into future, more conventional models.
Many concept cars are non-running mockups. They may or may not be that expensive to produce, depending on how far they go with the actual build process. As far as body design goes, it allows them to gauge responses to radical new shapes and features without actually spending hundreds of millions on a entire new product line only to have it fail…
Ford should have produced last generation’s Taurus in concept before building that butt-ugly thing.
Concept cars hurt my soul. The dodge razor in particular. I felt like a starving man chained to a wall, inches from a banquet, when I saw that car at the last carshow…
So, here’s a question. The dodge razor’s information pamphlets described a deal with razor scooters to put a scooter in the trunk of every razor. They had estimated prices for the razor in retail… They never, apparently, had plans of releasing it. Zuh? Were they really testing the concept of joining two unlikely products because they shared a similar name? Testing the concept of “really cool car, for a ridiculously low price (14k)”?
joemama24_98, it probably wouldn’t help as GM showed off the prototypes of the Azteks to shrieking hordes of fleeing car show goers and still built the damn things.
That being said, IIRC the average cost of a concept car is roughly $1.5 million depending upon the powerplant. If the car doesn’t have one, or uses a currently produced one, the price tag is around $1.5 mil or less, if it has an experimental engine under the hood, then the cost is higher.
Chrysler, before they were bought out by Mercedes, hired out the construction of their prototypes to a family owned business in California. Don’t know if they still do that or not.
I’d heard that the Razor was, at one point anyway, being considered for actual production. I’m not sure on the current status, as this was several months ago. I’d guess they had the pricing stuff done both because of this, and because the car was to be sold in a non-standard way (as you said, to be sold quite cheaply, but with a large amount of power under the hood, and minimal creature comforts).
Enola S got it exactly right. Think of concept cars as prototypes of the kind of cars a company might be building a few years in the future.
Check out the concept coupe BMW built some years ago, the Z9. It had some majorly controversial styling, especially at the boot lid, but it got seriously noticed by pretty much everyone! BMW took advantage of that, and other styling cues, and has incorporated them into its new 7 series. But there was no guarantee that this new stuff would even be appreciated by its target customer. The same goes for its radical I-Drive system. Without first testing the waters, BMW would have been commiting suicide by simply bringing out these designs.
Or how about sequential gearboxes? A decade ago, they were just a concept, too expensive to put into series prodution, and being used only in Formula 1 cars. Today, you can change gears by pressing a button on the steering wheel of the Alfa Romeo 147, which competes with the VW Golf!
Quite franky, there is no better way to guage the potential of a new technology/design than building a one-off and then displaying it to the target customer. If he likes it, yay! And if not, then it’s back to the drawing board, with the bank account still intact.
Modern concepts can be built on demand, too. CAD allows the engineers to input their safety, size, drivetrain parameters and then design the exterior on the computer model. The model is then broken into parts, built with CAD-controlled machinery, and then it’s time to play Legos. The engineers can build a car they’ve never even imagined before in under a week, for under a million, with a drivetrain and within NHSTA specs.
Think I’m lying? Check out the Dodge Razor again - that’s how it was built, in three days.
Every car company comes out with several concept models every year; only the best make the showroom floor. Most of them are created not for the purpose of production. Think of them as surveys: the manufacturers want to know of public opinion of the concepts introduced. Sometimes the cars are created for feedback on styling, but usually they are created for the parts. In other words, the manufacturers want to know people’s opinions on the engine/drivetrain/chassis combination, and so on. Until you see a magazine article featuring the car by itself (not from an auto show report), it wont be produced.
There’s one other factor that nobody seems to have mentioned. A part of the reason for the production of the cars is also to draw people in to the company’s stand at motor shows.
There’s a lot of competition for attention at motor shows and a cool looking concept car can be a very good way of getting the punters on to your stand and, once they’ve stopped staring at the concept car, you can start trying to sell them a family sedan.
