This should be a slide deck for startup school, or any product management course.
So many of these seem like obviously terrible ideas, and yet, these are what happens when you design products without customers.
You can see where some of them were just derivations of other companies design languages, where others were the expression of one meaninglessly novel idea (the catamaran car). Some of them you can see the thing they thought would be good (big windshield, aerodynamics, ornamentation, minimalism, quirkiness, etc), but when you tried to wrap a car around that idea, it was uncanny and un-car-like.
For each of these abominations, there are software and startup analogs, I'm sure of it.
I also like to think they were built thinking outside the box, because that box didn't exist yet. I think we should stop from time to time and think about our designs, is this the only and perfect way to design it? or maybe I'm just copying what everyone is doing?
Now days most cars, web pages, apps, phones, TVs, look the same, yes that has its benefits and maybe customers just want the same old things, but I always wonder how different designs would be if apple made a different iPhone, Ford a different model T, xerox a different UI...
At least with cars, I don't think you can trace most of their features back to the Model T. The model T had a completely different control scheme, wagon-like suspension, band brakes (for parking only), and was only available in black.
What I often like is when production cars have a concept-car like look with features you usually do not have with other cars. (Citroen C4 Cactus just comes into my mind)
The US has different legal requirements for cars to the ECE standards used by most of the rest of the world (US protectionism? Surely not). Unless Citroen / PSA renter the US market and make a special US variant, they won’t be legal until the car is 25 years old and qualifies for an exception.
So many of these seem like obviously terrible ideas, and yet, these are what happens when you design products without customers.
You can see where some of them were just derivations of other companies design languages, where others were the expression of one meaninglessly novel idea (the catamaran car). Some of them you can see the thing they thought would be good (big windshield, aerodynamics, ornamentation, minimalism, quirkiness, etc), but when you tried to wrap a car around that idea, it was uncanny and un-car-like.
For each of these abominations, there are software and startup analogs, I'm sure of it.