Concept cars…the dream machines that you never got but the manufacturers would sink millions into just to test some theories or to drum up some interest. They always had my attention…some well-meaning family member had gotten me a book about concept cars and the history behind them for a gift back in my elementary school days and it covered the basics through the modern days, from the Buick Y-Job of the late 1930s to the radical never-gonna-happen cars like the Ford Nucleon and the Firebird test cars of General Motors, to later-model units like the Ford Probe series of machines and the Oldsmobile Aerotech cars. Of course I ate it up…it was easy to tell the difference between far-out dreaming that the Nucleon represented versus developmental cars like the Mustang prototypes, to the near-production cars like the AMX/3.

The thoughts that go into concept car creations are varied and surely, this video was simply a showoff unit for Ford Motor Company, but look at the cars that they show off and see if you can determine what they influenced later on down the road. There is the 1964 Aurora concept station wagon with a bank of lights up front that spanned the width of the “grille” area, an airy glass cabin and not a speck of woodgrain in sight. Sounds like a 1989 Mercury Sable wagon to me. Or there’s the 1963 Cougar II concept, which seems aimed directly at the C2 Corvette from just about every direction. Take a look back in time and see where Ford’s head was at just around the dawn of the Mustang…it’s an interesting place to visit.