A Jet-Age Lincoln From Another Planet
Before it became one of the most famous TV cars ever built, the 1955 Lincoln Futura was already strange enough to be legendary. Designed by Ford’s Lincoln styling team and hand-built by Ghia in Turin, Italy, the Futura was a fully functional concept car created to show what American luxury might look like in the future. It reportedly cost about $250,000 to build, an enormous sum for a single experimental car in the 1950s.
The Futura did not look like a normal Lincoln. It looked like a spaceship that had learned to drive. Its long, low body featured sharply peaked fins, canted headlight pods, dramatic side scoops, and a clear double-bubble canopy over the passenger compartment. The car’s shape was influenced by the aircraft and rocket-age optimism of the 1950s, when Detroit designers were borrowing ideas from jets, missiles, and science fiction. Underneath all that fantasy, however, the Futura was a real running automobile built on Lincoln mechanical components.
Lincoln showed the car publicly in 1955, including a debut tied to the Chicago Auto Show. It later appeared on the show-car circuit and even in the 1959 film It Started with a Kiss, where it was still recognizably the Futura rather than the crime-fighting machine it would later become. Then a strange automotive mystery occurred. The car disappeared and showed up a few years later in the hands of Batman.
The Concept Car That Became a TV Icon
The twist in the Futura’s story came in the mid-1960s, when a new Batman television series needed a Batmobile quickly. Customizer George Barris already had access to the retired Lincoln concept, and its dramatic shape made it a better starting point than building a car from scratch. Ford reportedly sold the Futura to Barris for a token amount, often described as $1 plus other consideration, and Barris transformed it for the show in a matter of weeks.
That transformation changed the car’s identity forever. The silver-white concept became black, sharp-edged, and theatrical, with red striping, bat fins, nose blades, gadget-like details, and a silhouette that perfectly matched the campy energy of the 1966 Batman series. The bones of the Futura were still there, but the public no longer saw it as a Lincoln dream car. It became the Batmobile.
That is what makes the Futura such a fascinating piece of automotive history. Many concept cars influence production models. A few survive in museums. Some disappear into storage or are destroyed. The Futura did something almost no other concept car has done: it escaped the auto-show world and became a pop-culture object bigger than the company that built it.
What Happened to the Original Futura?
The original Lincoln Futura still exists, but not as the Lincoln Futura. It survives as the original Barris-built 1966 Batmobile, the car used for the television series and related appearances. That means the Futura was not lost in the usual sense. It was permanently transformed. For Lincoln historians, that is both wonderful and a little painful. One of the most important American concept cars of the 1950s survived, but only because it stopped being itself.
After decades in George Barris’ ownership, the original Batmobile crossed the auction block in 2013 and sold at Barrett-Jackson for $4.62 million. By then, its value came less from its status as a Lincoln concept and more from its place in television history. Still, underneath the black paint, red trim, and Batman mythology was the same one-off Ghia-built Futura that Lincoln had created to imagine the future.
That is the strange magic of the 1955 Lincoln Futura. It began as a jet-age luxury experiment, became a movie car, then turned into the most recognizable superhero vehicle in American pop culture. Most concept cars are remembered because they predicted something. The Futura is remembered because it became something else entirely.
