Good concept cars are like time machines. Take the three pictured above. Each gives a taste of tomorrow’s Mazdas – delicate frond-like head- and tail-lights, swoopy flying saucer profiles, elegant up-and-over doors and reverse-rake aero tails. Mazda design chief Laurens van den Acker wants his designers (in Japan, California and Germany) to deliver “the world’s most beautiful cars”.

Though very different, all three share a design language. Laurens talks about “being inspired by nature”; he talks about “flowing” design and “beauty and elegance”.

“Reverence of nature is a very Japanese thing,” he says. “There are a million things in nature to inspire you and every single one is beautiful.” The concept cars are also rooted in Mazda’s sports car DNA.

“We’re a young company. We will only succeed by looking ahead and designing the most attractive cars. We need to seduce people.” For Laurens, it’s about being eye-pleasing rather than eye-catching.

Laurens comes from Holland – another old artistic society, like Japan. “My father and brother are architects so I’ve always been into design. I remember my dad taking me to Scandinavia to show me every single one of Alvar Aalto’s buildings.”

He studied industrial design at Delft University then worked for a couple of Turin coachbuilders before joining Audi in Germany and then Ford.

He now lives in a modern apartment in Hiroshima. “I love living in Japan. It’s so inspiring. It’s one of the oldest cultures in the world yet one that changes all the time. It’s the one country where they embrace the past and the future with equal enthusiasm.”

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