When car designers went completely bonkers

There’s usually a moment in any car project where someone says, “let’s just rein that in slightly.”

A line gets softened. A feature gets toned down. A door, ideally, remains a door.

What’s fascinating about the late 1960s and 1970s is that, for a while, that person either wasn’t in the room, or was being completely ignored.

You can see it in the cars that started appearing at motor shows around that time. Not just the odd eccentric concept, but a steady stream of machines that looked like they’d been designed with complete confidence and only a passing interest in how anyone might actually drive them.

Take the Lancia Stratos Zero, for example. Not so much low as impossibly low – the sort of car that makes you instinctively check whether it’s melted into the floor. The entire windscreen lifts to let you climb in, which is presented as a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem of doors. And yet, when it debuted, it wasn’t treated as a joke. It was a serious idea about aerodynamics and packaging, just taken to an extreme that bordered on the theatrical.

That seems to be the pattern. These cars weren’t daft because nobody had thought them through – they were daft because someone had, and then decided to keep going anyway.

Part of it comes down to timing. The space race was in full swing, Concorde was redefining what “fast” looked like, and there was a general sense that the future was going to be very different from the present. Car design followed suit. If everything else was becoming more advanced, more dramatic, more futuristic, then cars probably should too.

And if you were a designer working at somewhere like Bertone or Italdesign, you weren’t just keeping up with that mood – you were competing with it, and with each other.

You can almost imagine the conversations. One studio unveils a sharply creased wedge, and the response from a rival is essentially: “right, fine, ours will be lower.” Which is how the wedge shape gets pushed further and further, until you end up with something like the Stratos Zero, or the Alfa Romeo Carabo, where the idea has been distilled to the point where practicality is no longer part of the equation.

Not that the engineers were exactly calming things down.

Mercedes-Benz, a company normally associated with doing things properly and not making a fuss about it, produced the C111 – bright orange, gullwing-doored, and looking like it had wandered in from a more interesting future. Officially, it was a testbed for new technology: rotary engines, advanced diesels, high-speed endurance work. Unofficially, it was also a chance to see what happened when you wrapped all that ambition in something visually dramatic enough to make people stop and stare.

And they did. Quite a lot of them, in fact. Many asked if they could buy one. Mercedes politely declined, which somehow makes it even more appealing.

By the late 1970s, things were starting to get a bit more… committed.

Aston Martin’s Bulldog is a good example of how far you could push the idea before it tipped over into something else entirely. The brief was ambitious enough – build a car capable of 200 mph – but the execution turned it into something closer to a concept car that had accidentally become real. Flat, angular, unapologetically futuristic, and fitted with gullwing doors for good measure, it looked like it belonged on a film set rather than a British road.

Only one was built, which feels about right. It’s not so much a production car as a very confident argument.

Elsewhere, the French took a slightly different route to the same destination. Citroën, never especially concerned with doing things the conventional way, produced concepts like the Karin, which managed to make other concept cars look a bit conservative. A pyramid-shaped body, a central driving position, and an interior that felt more like a design studio experiment than something intended for actual use.

And yet, like so many of these ideas, it wasn’t random. Citroën had a habit of questioning the basic assumptions of car design – where you sit, how space is arranged, what a car should look like in the first place. The Karin just asked those questions a bit more loudly than usual.

What’s interesting, looking back, is how seriously all of this was taken at the time. These weren’t throwaway jokes or publicity stunts in the modern sense. They were presented as genuine glimpses of the future, even if that future failed to arrive in quite the same form.

Of course, reality did eventually catch up. Regulations tightened, fuel economy became a concern, and the idea of building something purely because it looked extraordinary became harder to justify. The sharper edges were rounded off, the more outlandish ideas quietly retired, and cars settled back into something more recognisably sensible.

Probably for the best.

Or is it? It does leave you wondering what would happen if you gave a modern design team the same level of freedom and simply told them to get on with it. No constraints, no committees, no awkward questions about visibility or door mechanisms.

Maybe we’d end up somewhere very similar. Just with better air conditioning.