This One-Off Ford Concept Car From The ’70s Just Went Up In Flames

Do you ever think about what happens to concept cars once their short careers sitting on rotating plinths at motor shows are over? Some are destroyed, some are squirrelled away and forgotten in storage, but the lucky ones, like the 1979 Ford Ghia Probe I, go on to live second lives, giving us a sort of retrospective look at what we thought the future might look like in the past.

Sadly, the Ghia Probe I’s luck has just run out – it went up in flames while in transit back from the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in California yesterday.

The specifics of the incident aren’t clear, but wherever the fire started, it appears to have quickly engulfed both the car and the trailer it was travelling in. Thankfully, nobody was injured in the blaze.

Scott Grundfor Co., the company that restored the car and has owned it for over 20 years, said on Instagram: “We are a family oriented company, and it feels like we have lost a member of our family today.” Ford CEO, Jim Farley, commented that it was “A beautiful car and a piece of Ford history.”

The Probe I was the first in a series of five concepts introduced between 1979 and 1985, designed as low-drag, fuel efficient sports cars. While the first four were rear-drive, the fifth used a front-drive platform, and closely previewed what was planned to be the fourth-generation Mustang.

When word got out that Ford was planning a front-wheel drive Mustang, the decision was widely panned by enthusiasts of the car, so the third-gen ‘Fox Body’ car was heavily re-engineered into the fourth-generation ’Stang. Development of the front-drive car, though, was far enough along that it was put on sale – as the oft-derided Ford Probe.

The Ghia Probe I – the first part of its name coming from the Italian design house that Ford acquired in 1970 – was ultimately the first car in a series of concepts that would lead to something of a dead end for Ford. However, it also gives us an idea of what the Ford of 1979 thought the Mustang of the 1980s might look like, and besides anything else, it’s never nice to see the number of a car in existence reduced from one to zero.