What do the concept cars of the LA Auto Show tell us about the future?

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  The Vision Mercedes Simplex re-imagines the 1901 Mercedes 35PS. [credit: Brian Won ]

The prophets of doom are right; the auto show is fast becoming a spent force. I’ve been resistant to that idea, but this year’s LA Auto Show was as lackluster an event as I can remember. There was big car news these past days, all of which took place in LA: the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Volkswagen ID Space Vizzion, and of course the Tesla Cybertruck all made waves. But each met the public at an off-site event, and the Ford and VW were old news by the time the doors to the convention center opened for the first press day on Wednesday.

But we’re not going to focus on negativity today. Instead, we’re going to celebrate some of the four-wheeled eye candy at the show. The OEMs might not have brought much new to LA, but many of them did wheel out their takes on the future. Some are next year’s model with some added greebles, others are a view of decade or more from now, and require enabling technologies that aren’t quite there yet. Two are just race cars, built for SEMA and brought along to LA to make up the numbers.

No mind—I asked photographer Brian Won to walk the halls and, like the video game said, try to catch them all. And he did, with a couple of exceptions; BMW had put away its MNEXT and Kia’s Futuron was also hiding somewhere. Most of the captions are his, and I urge you to check out the massive gallery at the top of this article—the pictures are where it’s at.