I think you are confusing car culture with product placement.
I'm simply not drawing a distinction between one company wanting to do a design exercise and another. I'm not seeing people getting pissy when companies or people primarly known for designing cars, design other things, Pininfarina, Ital/Guigaro for example, perhaps DesignWorks... or
even Phil Frank Design... so why get pissy when designers from other sectors want to do cars? I suspect the answer to that is simply gatekeeping.
the engineering of these Vgt cars is fake or at best exaggerated.
Such is the nature of concept cars. They often represent an idea (you could say a concept, or even a
vision) before it gets pulled apart, watered down by manufacturing requirements, massaged by regulations and legislation, and re-moulded by bean counters, or in some cars, built to rule book that rules out many things that would give a performance advantage.
Over 10 years ago PD asked an energy drinks company "If you built the fastest racing car on land, one that throws aside all rules and regulations, what would that car look like, how would it perform, and how would it feel to drive?", and we got the Red Bull X2010... that car has/had what I'd regard unreal performance, that would out perform most, if not all VGT's, and if Adrian Newey thinks that's what could possibly be achievable without rules, regulations or budgetary constraints, I'm prepared to accept that. Ultimately if your benchmark for what is possible performance wise, is 'real' road cars, or 'real' race cars, then that performance benchmark is already artificially lower than it could/should be.
Don't get me wrong, there's clearly elements of some of the VGT's that go beyond that, the X2 being the obvious example, which takes a valid principle of laser propulsion to explore what a car that can lend all of it's grip circle to lateral forces because traction isn't required (interesting idea), but then waves it's hands and says power comes from an air-powered engine.... but the X2 isn't representative of all VGT's, and disliking one car shouldn't rule out anything else vaguely like it.
I do find it amusing when people refer to VGT's as SpA
Ce
SHIp
s when of the two cars in Gran Turismo that found their way into space, neither are VGTs.
What is not exaggerated is the marketing aspect.
Yes, all marketing should be banned, damned corporate greed. /s.
