5 Innovative Cars Considered to be Flops

In an automotive world full of round-ish crossover SUVs, the Tesla Cybertruck certainly is an attention-getter. Its bold, angular styling turns heads, but opinions differ on whether the Cybertruck looks like it is ready to power through a post-apocalyptic landscape or if it was sketched out by a bored eight-year-old. And the exterior isn’t the only thing controversial about the Cybertruck. While the vehicle features many innovations, from a steering by wire (rather than mechanical and hydraulic systems) and an exoskeleton construction, the electric utility vehicle also has been recalled at least four times and YouTube is littered with videos showing defects and design flaws.

In the 116 years since Henry Ford introduced the Model T, plenty of cars have pushed the boundaries of what is possible in vehicle design while simultaneously drawing scorn for the way those same innovations were implemented. Here’s a list of five unforgettably innovative cars that were also considered failures.
 

Bi-Autogo

Technically a motorcycle-automobile hybrid with a set of outrigger wheels that supported the vehicle at low speeds, the Bi-Autogo was the brainchild of Detroit newspaper heir James Scripps-Booth and built in 1913. The Bi-Autogo was powered by a 45 hp V8 engine cooled via a side-mounted copper radiator and weighed a whopping 3,200 pounds. The cyclecar also featured such innovations as a compressed-air starter, aluminum body panels, and a four-speed transmission. Unfortunately, without power steering, the massive vehicle was almost impossible to control. 
 
The Bi-Autogo never made it to market and only the prototype was produced, but Scripps-Booth later founded a namesake car company that became part of General Motors. 
 

Dymaxion 

Buckminster Fuller was a visionary architect, industrial designer, and futurist who is best known for developing the geodesic dome. For the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, Fuller designed a vehicle intended to travel on land and water as well as through the air. The three-wheeled Dymaxion car took design cues from the fuselage of an airplane or the gondola of an airship, with raindrop shaped body featuring large, wraparound windows. Like an airplane, the body was made from aluminum and the entire 20-foot vehicle weighed only 2,700 pounds, and unlike most cars of the era, the engine in the rear of the automobile powered a front-wheel drive. 
 
Designed to carry more than 10 people, the Dymaxion was difficult to steer, and the first prototype was involved in a fatal rollover crash during its time at the World’s Fair. While Fuller made wild claims of the Dymaxion’s advantages, ultimately, only three prototypes were built and only one survives. 
 

Edsel 

Unlike the Bi-Autogo and Dymaxion, the Ford Motor Company’s most controversial car went into production. In fact, Edsel was not a car, but an entire division of Ford devoted to making advanced, mid-market automobiles. Some of the technology was advanced for the mid-1950s. For instance, in place of the familiar dial for a speedometer, Edsels used a rotating dome that faced the driver, and the dashboard featured warning lights to alert drivers of conditions such as oil loss or engine overheating or if the car exceeded a preset speed limit—a crude form of cruise control. Notably, Ford introduced a push-button gear-shifting system mounted in the steering wheel hub and a remotely operated trunk opening system.
 
In spite of these innovations, consumers were not impressed with the Edsel line, especially in its styling and the lack of clear marketplace positioning. After a widely publicized launch in 1957, the Edsel line was discontinued after three model years. In retrospect, automotive observers considered the Edsel to be the “wrong car at the wrong time,” though many of the innovations and design idiosyncrasies have found ways into other vehicles. 
 

DeLorean 

While the Cybertruck looks like nothing else currently on the road, in the early 1980s, an angular car with a stainless steel body defined the outer edge of automobile design. Former General Motors executive John DeLorean started DeLorean Motor Company in 1975 as a business dedicated to building cars more innovative than American automobile companies were willing to make. 
 
The first (and only) model was the DMC, a low-slung, two-wheeled coupe with gull-wing doors. When it was announced, DeLorean promised the DMC would have a number of advanced features, such as an engine mounted between the passenger compartment and the trunk, passenger airbags, and ultrawide tires. Based on these promises, presales were extremely strong. As produced, many of the features never materialized, the build quality was disappointing, and the vehicle was much slower than expected. The company sold fewer than half the roughly 9,000 cars produced, and DeLorean Motor Company filed for bankruptcy in 1982. 
 

Hummer H1 

The Humvee first gained prominence during the 1991 military operation to remove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. The vehicle had a decided “cool factor” for many consumers who wanted to show their alignment with the American military. Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger had already been pestering the manufacturer, AM General, to produce a street-legal Humvee, so the next year, the company began selling a modified version for civilian use, the Hummer H1.
 
Powered by a 6.2 L GM Diesel V8, the H1 weighed around 8,000 pounds and since it used the basic body plan as the military version designed for off-road use, it was extremely wide: 86.5 inches, not including the mirrors. (That’s more than six inches wider than an F150 pickup.) Due to the design requirement for high road clearance, the drive train ran through the passenger compartment, limiting the vehicle to four seats. The combination of features made the H1 ungainly to drive, and the beast guzzled gasoline, getting fewer than 10 miles per gallon. While the Hummer definitely foreshadowed the trend toward large SUVs dominating American roads, AM General sold fewer than 12,000 H1s over the 15 years the vehicle remained in production.
 
Jeffrey Winters is editor in chief of Mechanical Engineering magazine.