Mercedes-Benz Bionic

The Mercedes-Benz Bionic is a concept car that DaimlerChrysler built under the Mercedes-Benz name and first showed in 2005 at the company's Innovation Symposium in Washington, D.C. Its body was modeled on the yellow boxfish, Ostracion cubicus, a coral reef fish that the engineers believed had a low drag coefficient and a rigid exoskeleton, and Mercedes-Benz reported a drag coefficient of 0.19. A 2015 paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface later found that the boxfish species it studied were not especially good at reducing drag, and the Wikipedia article notes that the GM EV1, at 0.195, stayed more aerodynamic overall because the Bionic had a larger frontal area. The car seated four and used a 103 kW direct-injection diesel engine with selective catalytic reduction, which the article credits with 80 percent lower nitrogen oxide emissions, and it could reach a little over 190 km/h.