"Gleanings" on concept car design

Christina Wodtke, who is clearly into cars, writes about concept cars.

If you make the concept car practical, all you are doing is making everyday design slightly more edgy, and simply creating another design team like the others. The concept car must be an unbuildable dream, because dreaming is what makes innovation possible.

She says that concept cars should be "unbuildable" and should exist to broaden the horizons of consumers and designers alike. She mentions the Chrysler PT Cruiser and the Volkswagen New Beetle (the Bug) as examples of concept cars "dialed back and made into a real car". I'm not that convinced that those two cars are the best example of cars that broadened horizons - I'd say that the PT was a deliberately retro take on the minivan, a sort of car that was invented many years before and the New Beetle was a Cynical Marketing Exercise that encompassed none of what the old Beetle was about (space efficiency and low cost) and was an effort to sell more cute Volkswagens to baby boomers and teenagers. They're cute, but they're not, to me, truly innovative.

Concept cars that were truly influential, in my opinion, were cars that brought innovation and difference to the "minivan" and "mid-size" car's -- the bread and butter of car makers. Christina hints at that idea by pointing to Marc Newson's 1999 021C, which is a cute, versatile, city car, not a far-out sports car[0]. It's easier to innovate in a sports car but to bring something new to the mainstream is what Christina is talking about. Harley Earl, for example, was responsible for most of the design language of American cars in the late 50s and early 60s - and he was responsible for what is considered to be the first concept car, the 1938 Buick Y-Job which had features that ended up on real cars for decades afterwards. He was responsible for the fins on just about everything that culminated in the oh-so-right excess of the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado.

Skipping forwards several decades, other really influential cars are the 1978 Lancia Megagamma[1] which is generally credited with beginning the true minivan class.

In short, I also think concept cars exist to make the impossible possible. I just think that they do it much better when they make the impossible into the everyday, like the Megagamma.

[0]Does the 021C remind anyone else of a French car? Single spoke steering wheel; spartanly practical. Hmm...
[1] A better picture is on The Lancia Pages but they seem to not understand the internet. If you want to find the Megagamma on that site you have to click concept cars and then scroll down for the Megagamma. Grr.