A CONCEPT car, as any car nut can tell you, is a prototype designed to shake up dusty, entrenched notions of car design.
The prototype, designed by Yves Behar and Johan Liden of fuseproject, a San Francisco-based industrial design company, is aimed at urbanites in congested cities.
Before the Willys-Overland, before A.M.C., before the CJs and Call of Duty Wranglers, there was the American Bantam jeep prototype, designed in Butler, Pa.
But runabouts like the Hiriko, a two-seat microcar prototype designed specifically for urban car-sharing programs, offer a promising solution to gaps in today's transportation network.
A Navy entry is the X-47B, a prototype designed to take off and land from aircraft carriers automatically and, when commanded, drop bombs.
The technology has been devised by Barclaycard – and a prototype designed and installed in a Central London pub, Henry's Café Bar - to help reduce queuing time for customers buying drinks during busy periods.
At the Geneva motor show last month it sought to demonstrate its turnaround by showing off the PhoeniX (pictured), a sporty prototype designed to serve as the template for the next decade's model line-up.
Their car is a quite radical front-engined, front-wheel-drive prototype, designed to release energy from the hybrid system as quickly as possible and thus features 14-inch tyres at the front with just nine inches of rubber in the rear, unlike any of its competitors on the grid.
TfL tests have apparently shown that the prototype, designed by London-based Heatherwick Studio and built by Wrightbus in Northern Ireland, will emit half the carbon and nitrogen pollution and run on half the fuel of the average diesel double decker.
"It is the first Infiniti prototype designed and developed outside Japan," he says.
A prototype designed to evaluate the proposal's performance and its feasibility was developed and implemented.
