20 classic concept cars we wish had been real

We'd have bought any of these in a shot

Some concept cars preview production models. Others are, quite literally, production models posing as design studies with bigger wheels and cameras in lieu of mirrors.

But sometimes a concept is just that: a concept. An experimental prototype fueled by passion, built for fun and displayed for attention.

While we can’t change the past, here are some of the concept cars from the 1970s and the 1980s we think would have made an impact had they reached production.

1. Ford Mustang Milano (1970)

The Milano broke cover at the 1970 edition of the Chicago Auto Show. Wide and unusually low, it wore a more muscular design than any regular-production Mustang before it, and many assumed it previewed the direction Ford’s popular pony car would take during the '70s.

They were, for the most part, wrong – the Mustang did get lower and wider in 1971 but it looked nowhere near as aggressive as the Milano concept.

What's more, in 1974 the Mustang II arrived and reinvented the range as a much smaller car with an unabashed emphasis on fuel economy.

2. Alfa Romeo Alfasud Caimano (1971)

The Caimano was the brainchild of Giorgetto Giugiaro of Italdesign, who saw a market for a sportier version of the front-wheel drive Alfa Romeo Alfasud.

Giugiaro duly turned the company’s entry-level model into an angular coupé that stood out with a dome-like windshield.

There’s little evidence to suggest anyone seriously considered building the concept, but it loosely inspired the tamer-looking Alfasud Sprint introduced in 1976.

3. Alfa Romeo Alfetta Spider (1972)

A lot changed in the Alfa Romeo line-up during the early 1970s. The Alfetta replaced the Giulia, the Alfetta GT succeeded the GTV and it made perfect sense to assume an Alfetta-based convertible would supersede the Spider.

Pininfarina’s wedge-shaped proposal was perfectly in tune with the prevalent design trends of the 1970s, and likely would have forced Triumph to re-think the TR7.

It looked nearly ready for production, too, but financial issues prevented Alfa from moving forward with the project, and the standard Spider remained a core part of the firm’s line-up until 1994.

4. Audi Asso di Picche (1973)

Commissioned by Karmann and drawn by Italdesign, the Asso di Picche (‘ace of spades’ in Italian) blended styling cues seen earlier on the Alfa Romeo Caimano (slide 2) with the production-ready chassis of an Audi 80.

Audi liked the idea, somewhat surprisingly, but ultimately decided to focus on rejuvenating its mainstream cars instead of spending money on a low-volume model.

Parent company Volkswagen also feared an affordable, front-wheel drive Audi coupé would steal the spotlight from the Scirocco it planned to introduce the following year, and the project never got any further than the concept stage.

5. Opel GT2 (1975)

With the GT2, Opel boldly announced that building sports cars in the post-oil-embargo era wasn’t impossible, as many car fanatics had feared.

Notably, the brand focused on tweaking the body to make it as aerodynamic as possible, in order to improve fuel economy.

Visitors to the 1975 Frankfurt Auto Show speculated that the GT2 previewed the long-rumoured successor to the GT, which Opel had discontinued two years earlier. But it wasn’t to be: two consecutive generations of the Manta instead represented the brand in the sports car segment, until the Calibra arrived in 1989.

6. Volvo 263 GL (1975)

In the 1970s, Volvo explored ways to replace the P1800 ES without taking the costly route of developing a standalone model. The 263 GL was one of the solutions it came up with.

As its name implies, it’s a three-door version of the 260-Series equipped with a 2.7-litre PRV V6 engine.

Volvo’s archives department notes that the 263 GL was interesting, but that it never stood a chance at making production.

7. Peugeot Peugette (1976)

Pininfarina took what was then the hottest Peugeot 104, the ZS, and made it even sportier by shaping it into a lightweight roadster.

The Peugette concept turned every head when it broke cover at the 1976 Turin Auto Show, and Pininfarina had high hopes for the design study. It even made the hood and the trunk lid interchangeable, to lower production costs.

But sadly it proved too wild to fit into the Peugeot line-up, and never received the proverbial green light for production.

8. Volkswagen Passat GTI (1977)

In 1977, Volkswagen engineers dropped a 110-horsepower, 1.6-litre four-cylinder engine pulled out of the Audi 80 GTE into the unsuspecting engine bay of a first-generation Passat.

They also upgraded the brakes, mounted wider tires and added a GTI-esque body kit.

Volkswagen briefly tested the Passat GTI on the roads around Wolfsburg, Germany, but VW boss Toni Schmücker seemingly believed that the words “performance” and “Passat” were mutually exclusive and canned the project.

9. Ford Fiesta Fantasy (1978)

The 1978 Fiesta Fantasy represented what could have become Ford’s belated answer to the Citroën Mehari.

It looked like a regular-production Fiesta from the tip of the front bumper to the base of the A-pillar, but beyond that, it offered a selection of glassfibre body panels that gave the Fantasy the ability to morph into a pickup, a four-seater convertible or a two-seater coupé.

10. Volvo Tundra (1979)

Bertone designer Marcello Gandini drew the Tundra to give Volvo an escape rope out of the boxy, angular design language it was stuck in.

Today, it looks a lot like the Citroën BX. At the time, it was a highly forward-thinking design with styling cues that accurately previewed the trends of the 1980s.

Volvo officials considered Bertone’s proposal as they began the long process of replacing the 340-series, but they ultimately turned it down, allegedly because its lines weren’t conservative enough and they feared it would be difficult to sell.

Gandini fine-tuned the Tundra into the BX, which arrived in 1982. Meanwhile, Volvo began thinking outside the box (quite literally) when it introduced the 480.

11. Nissan NX-21 (1983)

The 21st century looked awesome in 1983. Hailed as the car of the future, the Nissan NX-21 concept wore a wind-sculpted design characterised by a sloping hood, immense glass areas and partially covered rear wheels.

The passengers accessed the cabin through wide, quad-hinged gullwing doors, while inside sat a digital instrument cluster, a multi-function steering wheel and navigation.

Power came from the very latest evolution of Nissan’s ceramic gas turbine, a flexible unit capable of burning a wide variety of fuels including kerosene.

While most of the tech features seeped down into production cars over the following years, the styling and the powertrain were wide of the mark; Nissan introduced the original X-Trail in 2000, rather than a toned-down version of the NX-21.

12. Porsche 984 (1984)

Hidden in Porsche’s warehouse, the 984 prototype is the missing link between the 914 and the Boxster: a light, compact and affordable model executives envisioned as an entry-level car.

Porsche indicates it seriously considered building the car but it cancelled the project when new car sales collapsed in America, its biggest intended market, after the stock market crash of October 1987.

13. Saab EV-1 (1985)

Don’t let the initials ‘EV’ fool you: the Saab EV-1 wasn’t electric.

It was, however, a truly experimental vehicle which illustrated the Swedish firm’s astonishingly accurate idea of what the sports car of the future could look like.

The EV-1 used lightweight materials including carbonfibre-reinforced plastic, and featured roof-mounted solar panels that powered the A/C to keep the cabin cool when it was parked in the sun.

The futuristic lines hid a chassis and a turbo-charged four-cylinder engine borrowed from the 900, which engineers had bumped to 285hp.

14. Citroën Xanthia (1986)

Citroën displayed the Xanthia alongside the then-new AX at the 1986 edition of the Paris Auto Show.

Designed in-house, this pocket-sized two-seater roadster illustrated what could have been the fun side of the firm’s newest entry-level model.

It wasn’t too far-fetched of an idea, either. The AX GT’s 85hp four-cylinder engine would have made the Xanthia a blast to drive through the Alps, and using the AX as a donor vehicle would have kept production costs in check too – at least in theory.

Instead, Citroën dropped the ‘h’ from the name and slapped it on the back of a mid-size sedan in 1992.

15. Oldsmobile Incas (1986)

Italdesign built the Oldsmobile Incas concept and promptly presented it at the 1986 edition of the Turin Auto Show to a crowd who had, presumably, never seen an Oldsmobile before.

It didn’t matter; the Incas shared not the slightest trait with other members of the company’s catalog. It looked contemporary, for starters, and it swapped its stablemates’ large-displacement engines for a rear-mounted, 2.3-litre four-cylinder effort equipped with no less than four turbochargers.

In hindsight, the Incas looked far too avant-garde to reach production unchanged. A shame, as a toned-down version of it positioned at the top of the Oldsmobile line-up could have helped the brand stay relevant.

16. Chrysler Lamborghini Portofino (1987)

Chrysler’s purchase of Lamborghini quickly produced a sedan which, on paper, was nothing short of brilliant.

Named Portofino, it came to life when designers dropped a futuristic-looking body with scissor doors on an extended version of the Jalpa’s chassis; the mid-mounted 3.5-litre V8 engine remained.

The Portofino made its debut at the 1987 Frankfurt Auto Show, but unfortunately no-one at Lamborghini liked the car and it never progressed beyond the concept stage. Just think how many millions of bedroom walls might have been adorned with posters of it if it had.

In fact the only part of the Portofino that reached production was the star-shaped design of the plastic hubcaps – they appeared, ingloriously, on the Eagle Vision introduced at the 1993 Detroit Auto Show.

17. Lancia HIT (1988)

Lancia left the coupé segment when it stopped building the Beta and the Gamma in 1984. Fans balked; the brand had offered at least one two-door sports car since the 1950s.

Though not as shapely as earlier two-door models, the Pininfarina-styled HIT gave Lancia an opportunity to give the fans what they wanted.

HIT stood for 'High Italian Technology', and high-tech it most certainly was: the HIT was a cross of rally-tested mechanical components borrowed from the parts shelf labelled ‘Delta Integrale’ and lightweight materials such as Kevlar, glassfibre and carbonfibre.

However, Lancia refused to build it. Instead, coachbuilder Zagato made the fantasy of a Delta-based coupé a reality when, working with Lancia’s Dutch importer, it built about two dozen examples of the Hyena in the early 1990s.

18. Pontiac Banshee (1988)

Pontiac spent decades looking for a halo model. First it asked parent company General Motors permission to build the 1966 Banshee concept, but decision-makers turned down the request because they were afraid of creating internal competition for the Corvette.

Instead, it settled for the Firebird, a re-bodied Camaro. In 1988, Pontiac again resurrected the Banshee nameplate on yet another high-end, high-horsepower concept with the flair of a flagship sports car. And, once again, the design study never made the transition from the show floor to the showroom floor.

Still, at least some of its styling cues re-appeared on the fourth and final generation of the Firebird.

19. Lamborghini P140 (1989)

Decades of chronic under-investment began to seep through the cracks at Lamborghini as the 1990s approached. The Diablo finally replaced the Countach, but which car would take the torch from the Jalpa?

The P140 prototype showed what a successor could look like. It received the firm’s first-ever 10-cylinder engine, a naturally-aspirated unit that made 370hp in its most basic state of tune.

The P140 looked surprisingly close to production, too. Certainly Lamborghini's own history states that it wasn’t a wild, offbeat concept built solely to turn heads on the autoshow circuit.

It should have replaced the Jalpa. Product planners already knew when it would go on sale (by the mid-1990s) and how much it would cost (roughly $125,000; about $220,000 today). Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: financial issues stopped the project dead in its tracks.

20. Mercedes-Benz 190E Cabriolet (1989)

We'd have loved to see this drop-top 190E make it to production, but sadly Mercedes built only a single prototype before cancelling the project.

The proportions certainly looked spot-on, which is easier said than done when turning a four-door sedan into a convertible, and the roadster could have conceivably spawned a 190E coupé.

Product planners continued pushing for a roadster positioned below the SL until executives approved the W124-based model released in 1992.