Ray focuses on the weird and wonderful

Guild Vice-President Ray Hutton is one of the more prolific authors among our ranks and his latest book, The Real Concept Cars; Thirty Years of Cars of the Future has just been published by The History Press.

Ray tells News Briefs that the idea for this book came from a recent sort through his archive, material collected over many years covering motor shows and motor industry events. “I retained the press kits on cars that seemed to me to represent technical advances and also intriguing automotive oddities; these were concept cars but not in the more usual sense of attention-grabbing styling models or lightly-disguised future production models – technology demonstrators, shown once or twice and then forgotten.”

On putting 40 of these together, covering 30 years, Ray realised that, between them, these cars had previewed most of the technology we take for granted in today’s cars – along with some ideas that didn’t make it.

Among what Ray describes as “the weird and wonderful cars featured” are a Mercedes three-wheeler that wants to be a motorbike; a carbon-fibre family saloon designed by aviation genius Burt Rutan; an enormous eight-wheeled electric limousine; a BMW Mini with a central driving seat; a 2CV successor made like a plastic toy; two gas-turbine hybrids and Franco Sbarro’s extraordinary hubless wheels.  

As Ray so rightly says, “an eclectic bunch”  – running to 128 pages and illustrated with close to 150 photos, the book has a suggested retail price of £18.99, ISBN number 9781837051755. It is also available as an ebook at £12.99.