Lincoln Futura

The Lincoln Futura is a concept car promoted by Ford's Lincoln brand, designed by Ford's lead stylists Bill Schmidt and John Najjar and hand-built by Ghia in Turin, Italy, at a cost of 250,000 dollars. Schmidt got the idea while diving, after an encounter with a shark. Its official public debut was on 8 January 1955 at the Chicago Auto Show, after a preview for the press at the city's Congress Hotel on 5 January, and it appeared on the Today show on 3 March 1955. Its styling was original by 1950s standards, with a double clear-plastic canopy top, exaggerated hooded headlight pods and very large outward-canted tailfins, and unlike many show cars it had a complete, fully operable powertrain, a 368 cubic inch Lincoln engine on an early prototype Y-shaped backbone perimeter frame that went into production under the 1956 to 1957 Continental Mark II. Its original pearlescent white was made by mixing ground fish scales into the paint. Its headlight and tailfin motifs reached production Lincolns of 1956 and 1957, and in 1966 George Barris converted it into the Batmobile for the Batman television series; it sold at auction in 2013 for 4.62 million dollars.