Killing America’s Dreams, One Lousy Concept Car at a Time

Killing America’s Dreams, One Lousy Concept Car at a Time:

By Joel Johnson, Jalopnik

Concept cars aren’t just wank jobs of empty, aspirational futurism. They’re goal posts. They’re psychedelic mind-expanding drugs made of carbon-fiber and starlight. They stand as examples of not just where a car company could go, but where — barring a collective public gasp at an engineer’s daydream gone overly onastic — American culture will go once technology and manufacturing capability allow.

So as I sit here at the Detroit auto show, I wonder: Why have American automakers stopped dreaming?

There is a heap of praise, doled out with a scoop of platitudinal business-gray gravy, for Apple’s refusal to show the world anything before it’s ready. When an Apple exec stands before journalists and reveals the company’s latest creation with vaudevillian flourish, that new gadget already is on a boat from China, ready to be sold to you within a week or two.

I fear, though, that in the haste to emulate the Company Steve Built, our beloved auto manufacturers — once the pride of America — have misapplied that lesson from Cupertino. So Detroit, let me set you straight: If you’re going to make a concept car, you’re going to have to go all the mindblowing way.

The Chevrolet Code 130R made its world debut Monday at the Detroit auto show. Does this car inspire you in any way? No. No, it does not. John F. Martin/General Motors

There was a time, from at least the 1930s until well into my childhood in the 1980s, when an auto show meant one thing: a chance to walk through a hangar of science-fiction spaceships made real, where engineers annexed from the dolorous task of designing turn signals for midrange sedans could strut their stuff, exploring ideas that were often wildly, grin-inducingly ambitious. Strange shapes, hyperpowered engines, jet-inspired (and later video-game-inspired) dashboards, you name it. Nobody expected these rockets on wheels to actually make it to market, but we got to see how imaginative a company’s engineers and designers could be when beancounters loosened the reins.

That’s why concept cars exist — to push the margins of what customers will consider as possibilities. We’re a fickle bunch, auto buyers. We want our vehicles to look modern, but we don’t want to be driving a character-establishing punchline on Breaking Bad, either.

Concepts are a risk, sure. Having the public giggle at your concept car is about as much fun as getting laughed out of a school dance for the moves you’ve been practicing all summer. But when they work, they blow everyone away and get people talking.

Plymouth could have continued to stamp out meticulously boring coupes and sedans in the late 1980s, but the image implied by its sliding-cockpit Plymouth Slingshot concept made many of us reconsider the brand as a marque that took risks. And then it delivered on that message with the wild Plymouth Prowler, which despite its retro styling travels the same future-past arc (albeit inverted) as the Slingshot.

That risk of diminished respect, as well as the implication that concepts traduce customers with a promise of a future that can never be fulfilled, is the core of the Apple Doctrine. But it has never served the auto industry well. Car models are updated in substantial ways only every four to five years, not every one to two. Plus, electronics have iterated at a pace that has eclipsed the public’s ability to anticipate what’s next. Apple, in particular, has a unique place in the stuff-people-want industry, in that its ability to lock in exclusive deals with manufacturers that possess cutting-edge technology allows it to take products from research to development rapidly. Auto manufacturers don’t have that luxury.

And that is why milquetoast concepts serve no one. Customers aren’t being prepared to accept audacious styling, let alone profoundly different paradigms like drive-by-wire or — gasp! — electric vehicles.

What we have today in the American auto industry, depressingly, is the worst of both philosophies. Auto manufacturers reveal “concept” cars with features so mundane that it’s obvious to everyone that they’ll be on dealers’ lots in a season, just as soon as they remove the few minor novelties that make the damn things interesting. (You mean the mirrors on this concept won’t use LCD panels connected to cameras when it comes to market? Why not? That would be something actually compelling.)

Modern American concept cars are like online dating profile pictures: not so gussied up as to constitute a lie, but just false enough to ensure real-life disappointment.

Ford is perhaps the least transgressive, ironically not just because its concepts are the closest to production models (they are) but because those production models are themselves clad in the most modern, forward-thinking attire. (We’ll see if they can reboot Lincoln with the same excitement. I’m not expecting much.) Meanwhile, GM’s and Chrysler’s timid final designs mutate anything aesthetically or technically radical into embarrassingly avuncular mix-and-match production vehicles with all the style of a middle-aged man who insists his leather biker jacket redeems his stain-resistant slacks.

That said, admiration must be allowed for Cadillac’s rolling architecture, which remains as proud, coherent and as idiosyncratically American as Gotham City.

So enough of the persistent dribble of predictable concepts. Especially you, General Motors. Your terrible, boring cars of the last decade sold so poorly the American people had to bail you out once. I don’t think we can afford to do it again.

Inspire us! Justify our bankrolling your renaissance. Show us that American auto engineers are capable of out-dreaming or out-making the best from Europe and Japan. Hell — at least keep up with them. Give us cars that teenagers — who are quickly losing interest in not just American car culture, but cars in general — to use as wallpaper on their smartphones and iPads. Show me something I’ve never even thought so that for at least one week a year I can point to an American car company and say, “This is what we can do when we put our minds to it. This is where they’re going. This is why we saved them.”

For my part, I’ll refrain from doing that terrible thing that I, like most American consumers, do when I see concept cars: shrugging my shoulders. Make a concept car worthy of comment and I promise I will love it or hate it but never ignore it.

Photo: The Chevrolet Tru 140S concept made its world debut Monday at the Detroit auto show. Yawn. Steve Fecht/General Motors

This post was originally published by Jalopnik. Check out all of Jalopnik’s Detroit auto show coverage here.