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Car designers have always been keen to come up with new and unusual designs that push boundaries and feed the imagination of car enthusiasts. Some of these concepts never make it to the general market, but their beauty, innovation and, on occasion, downright strangeness deserve a wider audience. The Dream Cars exhibit at the High Museum, Atlanta collected photos of some of the strangest car designs ever created by man and put them on display in September 2014. You will love some, you may be less fond of others, but you cannot deny the uniqueness of each of these remarkable designs. Some of them even introduced features which have since become standard.
1. 1936 Scout Scarab
William Bushnell Stout was an engineer and innovator who left a mark on both automobile and aviation design, sometimes even combining the two, given that he designed the ‘Skycar’, a hybrid of a car and an airplane. He is also credited with introducing the concept of flight attendants and on-board meals to the aviation industry via his own Stout Airlines. He extended his ideas of leisure and comfort to cars with the Stout Scarab, which is often considered the forerunner to the minivans that followed. With it’s stretched body, luxury interior (including a table) and aluminum body, the futuristic looking car could have been a hit, but for the price of – $5000, which is around $95,000 in today’s money.
2. 1942 Oeuf Electrique
Photo: Michael Zumbrunn/Urs Schmid via High Museum
For those of you who are wondering, ‘Oeuf Electrique’ is French for ‘Electric Egg’ and you can see why it was given its name. It had three wheels, plenty of glass and it ran on batteries years after fuel had become the common way to run a car. The body is aluminum and curved Plexiglass, used to give the car its truly unique shape, while its diminutive size would make parking easy on today’s crowded streets. We wouldn’t be surprised if little electric, bubble cars like this one appear in the future.
