Shoulda-coulda-woulda, that seems to be the mantra of every would-be exotic car maker on the planet. Cizeta, Dome (above), and Yamaha with their OX99-11, the list seems almost as endless as the road one would want to fully experience any of them to their full potential. But sadly, for the dreamers of these missing marques it was not meant to be. Some of the cars, like Bizzarini’s attempted revival in the ’90s,  boasted amazing pedigrees, while others, such as the Jiotto Caspita, brought a fresh name to the super car table, if only for a brief time.

You have to wonder, what happens to all these cars when their eager champions either lose interest or run out of cash? Some end up, I am sure, in the collections of the wealthy and well connected, while others possibly end up on the scrap heap, their memory maintained by only a cached page on an internet backwater. Others, like Gerald Weigert’s Vector, get a fresh coat of paint and a new TV screen and hit the car show circuit again like a fighter well past his prime but still willing to lean through the ropes and give it another try, night after night after night.

The Vector really shouldn’t even be in this category as Weigert did actually produce a couple of customer cars, and the Indonesian company that undertook a company coup throwing him out (literally), built a few more that were re-bodied Lamborghini Diablos. What we’re interested in are the companies which debuted an amazing bullet-shaped product, touted as the fastest (fill in the blank) the world has ever seen, and then faded from memory before turning even one key over to an eager owner. Which do you think was the greatest exotic that never was?

Image: [private runners]