MERCEDES F 400, 2001
Last time you saw a car with wobbly wheels it probably had doors falling off it and 14 men in colourful make-up climbing out the passenger side door, but the MercedesBenz F 400 Carving concept didn’t deploy the effect for comic value. Rather the aim, said the company at the concept’s reveal in 2001, was to test “novel dynamic handling systems”.
Unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show, the
F 400’s secret weapon was tilting the outside wheels up to 20 degrees on the way through a corner like a motorbike, or perhaps a skier. In fact, that was where the Carving moniker came from, nothing to do with the blade you might whip out to dice up your Sunday bird.
The F 400 Carving enjoyed a 3.2-litre V6 engine under the bonnet, producing 215bhp and sending it all to the rear wheels. Nothing too novel about that so far, even if it does sound nice and spicy for an open-topped roadster. Of course, in this application it was fitted with a dry sump so as to ensure a plentiful supply of oil to the engine even during hard cornering.
It was when the power hit the road that the magic happened, though – the tyres on the F 400 were specially developed with extra grippy inside shoulders for when they were tilted. The precise angle of lean would be calculated by the car using onboard cameras to decide how much the wheels should keel over. The car was even designed such that if the driver engaged in a spot of emergency braking, all four wheels would suddenly turn in on themselves for maximum grip. Which wouldn’t be alarming at all in a developing situation.
The car also featured the standard fit concept car butterfly doors, innovative drive-by-wire tech on the steering and brakes, and strange fibre optic headlights. Because of how thin the bodywork was up where the headlights were located, hanging up there over the wheels, Mercedes developed a system where the actual lightbulbs lurked somewhere under the bonnet, sending the light to the lamps using fibre optics. Clever stuff.
Concepts are meant to be subtle hints of production cars to come, right? Well, if we were to really squint at the front end of the F 400 then maybe there was the teensiest hint of 2004 SLK somewhere around the bonnet, but overall the Carver concept is production Marmite. Complicated suspension? Two seats? No roof? It’s amazing it was even economical to build the concept car in the first place. The sole purpose of the F 400 concept was to show off fancy technology that Mercedes had made... well, really just because it could. Or maybe potential buyers took one look at the weird helmets Merc made the poor models wear for those promo pictures and scarpered.