Innovative Vehicle Ideas That Failed Immediately

Ford Nucleon

When a car is involved in a bad crash, it’s not uncommon for most of its parts to end up in pieces across the landscape. That’s one thing when you’re just talking about some metal and oil, but entirely another when you’re talking about a nuclear reactor. And that would have been the reality if the Ford Nucleon ever got past the concept stage.

The original design called for the use of a small fission reactor that would have given the vehicle a range of 5000 miles on a single “fill up”. The evolution to nuclear power probably seemed natural when the design was proposed in the 1950s, from a 21st-century perspective the concept is mind boggling—even if it was a zero-emission vehicle.