Pursuits
Rediscovering the Future With Old-Time Concept Cars
This article is for subscribers only.
If you want to see the future of car design, you might want to look to the past, to the concept cars designed decades ago.
Take L’Œuf électrique, a three-wheeled, egg-shaped electric model built for personal use by the French artist, industrial designer, and engineer Paul Arzens in 1946. It was conceived as a response to gas shortages during World War II, and it never went into production. But its fuel efficiency and compactness foreshadowed today’s Smart cars and hybrids.