I won't bury the lede here, this was supposed to be a nuclear powered car.

For a long time, I've felt that you can sketch a surprisingly accurate history of the world—at least since 1900 or so—by looking at the history of automotive design and engineering. Trends, hopes, and limitations of peoples and empires wrapped in steel and sitting on four wheels. And, for my money, nowhere is this more apparent than the absolutely buckwild cars that came out of the late 50s.

At this point, it's cliche to say that the 50s were a bright-eyed, hopeful decade. I also think it's wrong. It was an optimistic decade, sure, but optimism was not its defining feature. It was hubris. No other decade could have produced quite so many prototypes for nuclear-powered vehicles. It's as if engineers realized the power of the atom and declared "The future is bright and I am its Prometheus."

Most of this hubris, that I am aware of, at least, was distinctly American. The Ford Nucleon and Studebaker-Packard Astral promised a clean, nuclear, American future.

Into this new era of American hegemony and imperially mandated optimism, the Arbel Symétric arrived from France, though it took a few iterations before it became the big finned friend we see above, and I'm still not sure that it was ever anything but a strange grift from a used car salesman with a rich brother.

First imagined in 1953 by Casimir André Loubière as a bubbly hybrid people mover, the Arbel Symétric boasted a number of "innovations" that boggle the mind. The suspension, instead of using conventional springs or torsion bars, was just four rubber blocks, one mounted at each corner. And the fuel cell was simply included within the frame rails.

Over the years, Loubière's promises for the Arbel ballooned. By 1958, five years after he started working on the project, the feature list the Arbel Symétric was absurd. It was to have either a 50 or 75hp diesel engine, a "Genestafuel" diesel electric generator*, or the Genestatom, the previously mentioned nuclear powerplant, which was supposed to be able to run for five years on a single fuel rod.

Of course, none of this was real.

It is likely that, in the beginning, Loubière truly wanted to create a real car company that made real cars that actually existed. However, by 1958, he was running out of his rich brother's money and his rich brother's patience. He needed to get out of the car business and get as much of his brother's money back as he could. So he had some brochures printed up, showed the world a non-running prototype, and made some big promises. Loubière's real dreams turned into a shifty grift, and he started selling the Symétric for about the same price as a Citroën DS: 900,000 francs. He never delivered, and neither his company nor his wild prototypes still exist.

The great irony is that it is much easier to sell a car that doesn't exist than to sell one that does, which means that, despite posturing from Detroit's Big 3 about their up-and-definitely-coming nuclear cars of the future, it's probably this weird little French thing that was the first nuclear-powered automobile that was ever sold. So long as you accept that selling and delivering are two separate things.