Clay Dean spends his days imagining the future. You might soon be driving what he dreams.

As executive director of General Motors' advanced global design department, he is currently envisioning the roads of 2040, and what he sees is very different from today.

We are on the verge, he says, of a renaissance, an era in which car design will change the look of our roads, the way we commute to work, how much stress we endure throughout the day, even our impact on the planet.

"Today, it is all possible," says Dean, who sees Walt Disneys vision of futurism as a model. "It is an exciting time to be a designer."

This month marks 85 years since GM became the first automaker to create a department devoted entirely to body design. That department now finds itself at a crossroads: as GM, the worlds biggest automaker, and other major American manufacturers seek to regain the country's confidence and engage younger buyers - and even expand their business to more distant, untapped markets - innovating at a pace beyond what most car companies are used to will be key.

GM hopes its history will be instructive. The company's first design chief, Hollywood coachbuilder Harley Earl, added colors beyond the then-standard black and is credited with the idea of the "concept car" - as in, a sexy, wild-looking design (albeit one that people may not actually be able to drive). By the time Earl retired in 1958, he had some truly progressive designs to his name, too, from the 1938 Buick Y-Job, with its hidden headlamps and electric windows, to the 1956 Firebird II, which included a guidance system that GM said would soon be integrated with the "highway of the future," enabling the car to drive itself.

This hasnt quite come to pass.

Even if automakers push through innovative new products, it's unclear if people will buy them. The most popular cars today aren't known for their radical styling. The Toyota Camry has been the best-selling car in the U.S. for every year since 1997 except one.

Nor is it certain the automakers will manufacture anything too out of the box. Take the Chevy Volt, the advanced hybrid battery-powered car that has won accolades and awards for its design, but almost didn't happen. It took the persistence of one top executive to convince the company's board that the idea made financial sense.

These are the kinds of challenges the Big Three U.S. automakers have struggled to meet for decades. The flying cars promised more than half a century ago remain far from dealers' lots, but with their companies' futures anything but certain, designers at GM, Ford and Chrysler now seem to feel a new urgency as they grapple with new material compositions, shifting transportation needs and, not least, the legacies of their predecessors, which loom large around them as they work to make Americans fall back in love with the automobile.

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Futuristic Car Design Is Already In the Works At The Detroit Automakers