What is it like to drive a concept car?

Concept cars are great for showing a brand's vision and potential – but driving them is a different story altogether "You don’t want to know. It would ruin the illusion, wreck every appealing reverie that those bright motor show lights and cooing onlookers once inspired." "Did you like it? Think it a shame that it never got built? Great. Let’s not let the facts ruin a lovely, wistful idea.” As criminally jaded as it must undoubtedly make me seem, this has become the stock response I give when asked what driving a concept car is like. It is, apart from anything else, also a great privilege, a singular opportunity and a huge vote of trust and faith. Any drive like this always feels special one way or another. But honestly, concept cars are for looking at; for exploring ideas, capabilities and potential. I find them fascinating, especially when they’re technically bold or innovative. But as far as driving them goes… well, a seafood lasagne might look quite nice once you’ve topped it with sauce and grated cheese, but you wouldn’t actually eat it until it had spent a good three-quarters of an hour at gas mark five, would you? The thing is, once it has been finished at the very last minute, delivered to the show stand still glistening with tacky paint and then admired by all and sundry, the initial fervour around the unveiling of a concept car soon passes. From there on out, they don’t often get a lot of coverage. That’s only one of the reasons why hacks like me can end up driving one. They’re usually rather unsatisfying stories to write, funnily enough, as much as these are often disobliging cars to drive in the first place – principally because how they actually drive is wildly irrelevant. They can be slow, awkward, noisy, smelly, unpleasant and uncomfortable – but it doesn’t matter. Don’t write it, for God’s sake. Nobody really wants to know. Just pick out the interesting bits. Filter out and expand on what might just survive to any production version or indirect descendant. Be a journalist. I began learning how all this works back in 2006, when a chance to drive a brand-new Mazda sports car came along. If you remember the Kabura, give yourself a goldfish. It was a cool-looking, 2+1-seater, MX-5-engined coupé with a fantastic asymmetrical layout, concocted by the company’s then design boss, American Franz von Holzhausen (who now runs the colouring-in department at Tesla). It was a fantastic idea: a kind of half-an-RX-8. I loved it. As I remember, it rode like a go-kart with only chassis flex for suspension, steered like an HGV with a knackered assistance pump and spent most of my test drive rubbing its enormous wheels against its arch liners. Not that I troubled anyone with details like that in the report I wrote, because I desperately wanted that, whatever it might be worth, to give the Kabura every chance against Mazda’s bean-counters. Look how that turned out. Two years later, I drove Audi’s 12-cylinder diesel-engined R8 show car (the R8 V12 TDI Le Mans) on a specially closed length of Miami highway. That felt like quite the occasion. This was the supercar supposed to have 738lb ft of torque – but because it was a show car built in a matter of weeks, it actually had a six-speed manual gearbox from an Audi A4 and an ECU that would in fact dole out only 369lb ft. Among other concept cars that have flattered to disappoint over the years, I’m fortunate to count Peugeot’s 2010 EX1 electric endurance racer (“kindly sit in the door pocket, if you would, sir, and then, as it were, close yourself”). But then there was the awesome Jaguar C-X75 in 2013 and the incredible Ariel Hipercar in 2022. Those, I’m pleased to report, were very different experiences. But that’s because they weren’t show cars but prototypes – and those are another story entirely.

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