What A Concept

In the automotive world, there are these things called concept cars. They're one-off cars displayed at shows, as a kind of demonstration or prototype. There are several purposes behind them:

• They catch people's attention, and get them to stop at the manufacturer's booth.
• They give tangible form to a new technology. (Instead of describing the abstract benefits of a new technology, you talk about what this car is capable of.)
• It's a chance to evaluate a new design style in a way drawings and computer models never could.
• It lets the manufacturer evaluate reaction to a car they may actually be considering building (if is a relatively conservative design.)

But here's the grain of salt you should take with these cars: often times, they aren't real. I mean, there is actually a car there at the show, it's just that it might not be what is implied. Often, it's just the body and interior, with no engine. Or it's one of the company's existing cars with a futuristic body on top of it. Some don't even have interiors. And when the execs talk about the car's capabilities, they're usually just talking about what the hypothetical car would be capable of, if it were built. On top of it all, there's the simple fact that just because something can be built, doesn't mean it can be built for a reasonable price. Or that it can be built in large numbers.

Within the automotive press, this is all understood, and concept cars get treated with the aforementioned grain of salt. They're news if they have a particularly novel technology, or if they fit into that last category of cars that might make the market. But otherwise, they're just eye candy. Unfortunately, as the line between the car business and the tech business gets blurred, there's more opportunity for naive journalists to get taken in by concept car snake oil.

The latest example is from Faraday Future, an American-based, Chinese-funded electric car start-up. There's a lot of scepticism about them, and rightly so: it's hard to get an entirely new car company off the ground. And extra hard if you're also using new technology. Sure, there's Tesla, but there's also a graveyard of small car companies that never got across the starting line. They might have been unlucky, incompetent, or they were just scams from the start. And even if you make it to market, for every Tesla, there's a Fisker.

So Faraday Future is a believe-it-when-I-see-it proposition. And when they showed up at Consumer Electronics Show with an outrageous, non-running concept car, it was a non-story. If anything, it was such a transparent distraction tactic, that it raised doubts about them. But because it was an electronics show rather than a car show, the many reporters there to report on the latest gizmos just ate up Faraday's offering. Lots of them described it as looking like the Batmobile. It did, but it made me think of the styling of the Vector, an exotic sports car from the 80's. And oh look, it turned out to be a scam that never made it to market.