The World’s Most Famous Car The Story of Batmobile

Built as a one-of-a-kind concept car for the 1955 new car shows, including the Chicago, Detroit and New York Auto Shows, the Lincoln Futura was wildly styled and had a dramatic visual impact on all that saw it. It represented the future on four wheels. Credit for the appearance of the unique vehicle goes to Bill Schmidt, who was Lincoln-Mercury’s chief stylist. Aspects of the design were said to partly have come to fruition after a 1952 fishing trip to the Bahamas that Schmidt had taken with GM’s styling boss Bill Mitchell, where both of them viewed and enjoyed the tropical beauty of the sea life there. As it turned out, that scuba-diving vacation had an impact on the American automotive world, as both Schmidt and Mitchell used their underwater experiences and took their studies of sharks and applied it to designs on special projects (for Schmidt the Futura and for Mitchell a few years later with the Stingray racer, Mako Shark I & II and the Manta Ray Corvettes).

The Futura was a real, functional and operating vehicle,