In its purest form, a concept car is a look into an automaker’s crystal ball. It showcases new technology, over-the-top design, and outrageous performance. While most concepts take center stage at auto shows, more often than not, they’re relegated to a dusty museum or sent to a crusher afterward.
Concept cars are not a new, well, concept. They’ve been around for nearly a century. The 1938 Buick Y-Job is widely considered the first concept car, even though Volvo’s Venus Bilo technically debuted five years earlier. The idea really didn’t catch fire until the 1950s and ‘60s, when the Germans and Italians got their hands on modeling clay and sculpted some truly fantastic things.
Photo by: Buick
1938 Buick Y-Job Concept
In the 1970s and 1980s, America came into its own with concepts like the Chevrolet Aerovette, one of the first far-flung ideas from a US automaker. Ford followed with the Probe II and Maya sports cars. There was another mid-engined Corvette—the Indy—and when Chrysler owned Lamborghini (remember that?), the duo teamed up for the four-door Portofino.
But maybe the most outrageous American concept car of the 1980s came from a brand you probably never expected.
The Beginnings: Oldsmobile’s Almost Supercar
Photo by: General Motors
1987 Oldsmobile Aerotech Concept
At the time, Oldsmobile was a huge success in the US. Between 1983 and 1986, the company was moving nearly 1 million cars annually. So with money to blow and the new “Quad-Four” engine imminent, complete with dual overhead cams and 16 valves, the company needed a way to showcase its latest engineering breakthrough.
The Quad-Four made just 150 horsepower in production form, and it would go on to power hundreds of thousands of vehicles across the country. Oldsmobile figured the best way to promote its new engine was with a highly modified, 900-horsepower, track-ready hypercar designed by icon Ed Welburn, naturally.
The goal, as with most concept cars, was to take a relatively mundane technology and turn it into something spectacular. A longtime head of GM Design, Welburn designed the Aerotech and remembers it well.
Photo by: General Motors
Ed Welburn With The Oldsmobile Aerotech Concept
“One of the initiatives was to create a high-speed research vehicle to establish a closed-course record,” Welburn tells me via email. “This came at a time in which there had been a flurry of closed course records set by Porsche and Mercedes, all with 12- or 8-cylinder engines. Aerotech had a 2.0-liter, turbo 4-cylinder engine.”
But the Aerotech’s lack of cylinders didn’t slow it down. IndyCar legend AJ Foyt hit 257.1 miles per hour on GM’s test oval, breaking any and all closed-course speed records of the day. It was a huge accomplishment for Oldsmobile at the time and a significant accomplishment for the Aerotech.
The design, though, is what people remember most.
A sleek, silvery body with a long-tail rear ripped from a Le Mans car. Welburn used the Porsche 917LH as his inspiration for the proportions, while the Oldsmobile team employed a wind tunnel to ensure the Aerotech was as slippery as possible. It had a drag coefficient of around 0.30 cD, which may not sound impressive now, but it was revolutionary at the time.
Photo by: General Motors
‘One of the initiatives was to create a high-speed research vehicle to establish a closed-course record.’
“Well-executed aerodynamics were critical in helping Aerotech set its records,” says Welburn. “We were fortunate to work with one of the most talented aerodynamicists in the industry named Max Schenkel. Max was brilliant and had deep knowledge and experience with high-speed vehicles, and understood the needs of the designers.”
The Aerotech never made it to production, although Welburn admits that he did create “a couple of sketches of a street version of the car”—just imagine what could have been. Regardless, it remains an important piece of Welburn’s portfolio, which includes concepts like the Cadillac Ciel and Elmiraj, and production cars like the C7 Corvette and Pontiac Solstice Coupe.
Photo by: General Motors
“Aerotech was one of my favorite projects,” he admits, “not just because it set records for speed and later for endurance; it was the first project in which I was not only sketching, but I also managed the project from a design perspective and spent an incredible number of hours in the wind tunnel working with Max. Through Aerotech, I learned the power of collaboration…”
The Aerotech was a huge accomplishment for Oldsmobile, not just on the track, but as a technology showcase. Other American automakers took note. The Aerotech’s impressive reception would help spawn a hypercar obsession that lasted well into the new millennium.
The ’90s: Ford’s Far-Flung GT90
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
1995 Ford GT90 Concept
The original Ford GT40 officially hung up its helmet in 1969, ending a hugely successful career in endurance racing with multiple Le Mans wins. But it would be another 20 years before Ford took a second crack at its iconic sports car.
The GT90 concept debuted at the 1995 Detroit Auto Show, stunning onlookers with its dramatic angles and retro-fantastic interior. This was Ford’s first true take on a hypercar. Vice President of Design at the time, Jack Telnack, wanted to showcase the brand’s then-new “New Edge” design language. The look was penned by James Hope, and the GT90 would eventually go on to inspire the fourth-generation Mustang and most of the Blue Oval’s products throughout the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
“[Ford] basically said we want a new direction, we want something fresh, new, and exciting,” Hope said on an episode of the Crown Unfiltered Car Design podcast. “So I was doing all these stealth cars, and that was adapted as the direction. It all came together with this exciting push to do this new design language, this kind of stealthy, angular design language that no one was doing. It was completely alien.”
Based loosely on a Jaguar XJ220 chassis at the time (remember when Ford owned Jaguar?), the GT90 had all the fixings of a proper hypercar. Powering this beautiful beast was an equally beastly engine: A quad-turbocharged 5.9-liter V-12 paired to a five-speed manual transmission.
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
On paper, at least, the GT90 made 720 horsepower and 660 pound-feet of torque, with Ford admitting that a modest tune could result in over 900 horsepower. The GT90 would reportedly hit sixty mph in just 3.2 seconds, and it would continue on to a top speed of 235 mph. Just a bit quicker than the original.
Ultimately, though—unlike the Aerotech—this car never ran at full capacity. So we never truly saw what it could do. Ford did allow a few journalists, including Jeremy Clarkson, time behind the wheel in a speed-limited version of the GT90 that was good for only 40 miles per hour. But the concept was mostly built for show.
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
So why didn’t Ford build it?
Ford never really intended to put the GT90 into production from the beginning. The concept was ultimately relegated to storage before finding its way to the Hajek Motorsports Museum in Ames, Oklahoma, of all places, where it still resides today.
The Early 2000s: Cadillac Keeps It 100
2002 Cadillac Cien concept
Nearly a decade passed between the Ford GT90’s debut and the Big Three’s next hypercar. But in 2002, Cadillac’s 100th anniversary would spawn a vehicle befitting the occasion.
The Cadillac Cien—which literally translates to “100” in Spanish—debuted at the Detroit Auto Show in 2002 as the luxury automaker’s first entrant into the hypercar space in its 100-year history (though, not its last).
Imagined at GM’s Advanced Design Studio in England, Simon Cox (the same designer behind the infamous Isuzu Vehicross and Saturn Sky, oddly enough), penned the final design. The Ciel’s angular styling ushered in a new era for Cadillac—sharp, muscular lines that still linger in the brand’s current lineup.
Cox said of the Cien: “I wanted to celebrate a century with a product that really shows that we have the technology and performance—there are no bounds to where we can go.”
Built atop a bespoke carbon-fiber monocoque chassis developed, in part, by the UK’s Prodrive, the Cien would outgun Ford’s GT90 with a 7.5-liter V-12 making 750 horsepower. That was enough to send it to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds and on to an estimated top speed of 217 mph. Again, all in theory.
Given its warm reception in Detroit, Cadillac brass floated a small production run of Ciens at a cost of around $200,000 each. Ultimately, though, given its high price and dramatic looks, the company decided that the Cien just wasn’t right for buyers at the time.
But with the auto show wars still raging in the mid-2000s, just two years later, we’d see a worthy contender to Cadillac’s Cien.
The Mid-2000s: Chrysler Goes All In
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
2004 Chrysler ME Four-Twelve Concept
At the request of then-president and COO Wolfgang Bernhard, Daimler-Chrysler would enter the hypercar wars with the ME Four-Twelve. Like all good concept cars of the day, it debuted at the 2004 Detroit Auto Show.
More than 50 designers were tasked with putting pen to paper in hopes of bringing Berhard’s dream car to life. But it was a young designer out of Chrysler’s Pacifica Advanced Design Studio named Brian Nielander who earned the right to see his sketches become reality.
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
“You always want to get the show car. You want to get your sketch picked. But there was definitely a lot of competition,” Nielander tells me. “I was really hungry to finally land it, so I remember when they finally announced what car they were going to use—I don’t think it was elation, it was just relief. I remember walking up to my car to leave work that day and just sitting in my car like, ‘Okay, I got it. I got it.’ It was an awesome feeling.”
Brian would draw heavily from the Art Deco motifs littered throughout Chrysler’s lineup of the day, leaning on straight, fluid lines to give the concept its unique shape.
“The body side was the defining feature of the car—those lines that came up and over the wheels and then fanned back,” Brian notes. “There were ‘lines of action’ and ‘lines of reaction.’ So the door cuts and the side glass had these lunging lines—even the antenna did that. It’s like they were leaping up and out, while these lines of reaction came off the wheels and shot back.”
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
The ME Four-Twelve was peak 2000s Chrysler design, but even today, it still looks modern. Many of those same lines would go on to show up on production cars like the Crossfire and 300C, helping shape the next decade of the Chrysler lineup.
Sculpted around a carbon and aluminum honeycomb tub, the body itself was made entirely out of carbon fiber. The chassis came from Mercedes-Benz, and behind the driver was a quad-turbocharged 6.0-liter V-12 engine Chrysler pulled from Stuttgart’s parts bin. With 850 hp, the ME Four-Twelve could (theoretically) reach 60 miles per hour in 2.9 seconds and a top speed of 248—just a titch above what Ford estimated with its GT90.
To complement all that power, the body was sleek and slippery, meant to limit wind resistance. Various vents and openings on the front end were carved out to keep air flowing freely overtop the car, while Audi R8-like rear blades on either side sent fresh oxygen directly into the V-12. Remember, this car came before the R8.
But even with Daimler leading much of the charge on the engineering front, the design was entirely home-grown.
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
‘I was really hungry to finally land it, so I remember when they finally announced what car they were going to use—I don’t think it was elation, it was just relief.’
“With the exception of Bernhard, who was very involved in the project in a good way, it was all very focused in Auburn Hills. [The company] was very willing to let me run with it and take responsibility for it. You see a lot of designs go through the process and there are a lot of people that put their input into it… But I had a lot of freedom with this car, which was a really cool thing.”
Although the ME Four-Twelve started life as a 2D sketch, Brian says “around 95 percent” of the final design was done in 3D rendering software—a relatively new technology at the time. That meant, from start to finish, the concept took less than a year to finalize.
“Creating these sorts of interlocking shapes that then created other newer interesting shapes, I think was really interesting,” Brian says. “Because that software was pretty new at the time, it was a cool way to help execute it.”
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
Chrysler promised a production version on the road less than six months after that. More than the Aerotech and GT90, Chrysler did indeed have plans to put the ME Four-Twelve into production. A second running and driving prototype would debut less than a year later, with a handful of lucky journalists taking it for a spin around Laguna Seca.
“You heard the rumors that we’re going to try and build this,” Brian recalls.
Although it was nearly finished, with trouble brewing at the top of the corporate ladder, the ME Four-Twelve would suffer the same fate as the Aerotech, Cien, and GT90 before it. Chrysler’s home-grown hypercar would never hit the road—destined for a storage compartment somewhere in Auburn Hills.
Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
Brian, though, still remembers it fondly.
“Since I was little, at least in high school, that’s all I wanted to do—I wanted to design cars. I wanted to draw supercars, race cars, whatever… [The ME Four-Twelve] was the moment, because these projects rarely come around, especially this magnitude… All these years looking back on it, I was just grateful for the opportunity.”
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Photo by: Sean C. Rice | Motor1
2008 Saleen S5S Raptor Concept
The GT90, the Cien, and the ME Four-Twelve carried on a legacy that Oldsmobile helped pioneer. Into the late 2000s and 2010s, few concepts carried the torch—the Ford Shelby GR-1 in 2005, the Chrysler Firepower the same year, and the beautiful Saleen S5S Raptor in 2009, with a handful of others in between.
These days, the hypercar craze has cooled on this side of the pond, barring a few exciting outliers. No longer are we flocking to Detroit to see the latest and greatest ideas from Dearborn or Auburn Hills; there’s no more mystery as to what might show up at the Huntington Place convention center (née Cobo Hall). American hypercar concepts, as we know them, have all but disappeared.
But that’s not to say these ones aren’t worth remembering.
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