Concept cars represent much more than flights of fancy from the minds of ambitious auto designers. They’re great ways to test public reaction to a new look before committing to production; they build carefully crafted buzz around factors marketers want you to associate with their brands; they can drum up investment and, at a minimum, they’ll drive foot traffic to an automaker’s stand at autoshows.

Most importantly, concept cars represent a way for automakers to take risks without putting the future of their companies on the line. And from such risk comes both wildly ambitious breakthroughs and spectacular, disastrous flops. Here we’ve assembled ten of the most important concept cars that run the full gamut of conceptual successes and failures.

Audi Avus

Like opening a portal into a future where WWII German technology hadn’t been bombed into smithereens, the Audi Avus wowed the world when it was unveiled at the 1991 Tokyo Motor Show. Despite huge success in rally racing during the previous decade, Audi wasn’t a brand people thought capable of making such a slick supercar. After all, it was just coming out of its own unintended acceleration crisis. Fifteen years later, with the Best of What’s New award-winning R8, Audi rose to the forefront of the German luxury brands, adapting the Avus’s styling archetype not only to the supercar, but to its full range of passenger cars too.

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