no, really

There is a practice in the automotive world that is pretty well known to the non-car-obsessed person on the street: concept cars. Every day a group of creative out-of-the-box thinkers is working on a car that a) is designed for 20 years down the line, b) will likely never be produced or sold, c) probably will require a tow truck to move it (not designed to drive), and d) has a slew of totally bizarre and that’ll-never-work toys built in. We’re talking 20-foot long 20 inches tall, made of 90% crystal clear aluminum and 10% Kevlar, has headlights that blink like eyeballs, seven tires, and a collapsible bicycle that fits in the trunk. Totally impractical.

These little expensive useless toys are the cornerstone of the automotive industry. A few times a year, at the really important car shows, every automaker drags out their latest concept, sticks it on a rotating platform with wacky lighting and Carmen Electra’s hot twin sister wearing a napkin and some dental floss, and says “look what we can do with $20 million!” It’s the Miss America pageant of the car world.

Automakers give the “paper” designers all the latitude they could dream of to draw pictures of a beautiful car. Then they give their R&D people lots of caffeine and a new server to render their CAD drawings so they can make current equipment better, and invent the rest. And right on down the line, they encourage their concept workers to go crazy with their work; to make the fastest, coolest, flashiest, shineyist, sexyist car on the planet.

Nearly all of what goes into a concept car is piled in the ash heap each year, but from those embers the designers and the engineers get fantastic ideas for next year’s vehicles. They get feedback from journalists and enthusiasts. They realize that they can make that crazy idea work, so they build it.

I love this institution. It’s a piece of my childhood mind that I still have to this day. When I check out those concept cars in person, I think back to all the concept cars I experienced since I was little. My imagination clicks on, and suddenly I’m there, in the driver’s seat, pushing all the buttons and shifting it in gear, and rounding the curve at top speed. On more than one occasion, I think I’ve drooled.

Then I got to thinking: why doesn’t this exist in software? I mean, it kind of exists in the form of betas, but by the time something gets to beta or even alpha stage, it’s far beyond the “concept car” stage. Unlike a beta, a concept car is never meant to be built – that’s not the point. Google has Google Labs, but even that is more of an incubator of betas than a showcase of concepts.

Who is out there dreaming up the next big idea in design? Or the next AJAX? Where’s the big show where Google and Yahoo! and eBay and AOL bring their (semi-functional) concept sites to show off their amazing designers and brilliant engineers? This could be a practice that everyone can get in on. Any product that is meant to last more than one cycle needs to have this concept phase. We need to take our dreams of what’s next and make them a reality in earnest.

I guess maybe the reason this doesn’t exist yet is because the software (specifically web) industry is still working on getting their version of the internal combustion engine working right without breaking down. It took Ford a while before he could start getting creative with his horseless wagons. But then again, maybe it’s time to start pushing ahead instead of trailing behind. If for no other reason than it’s fun.