In baseball, you can strike out in basically one of two ways: swinging and missing or staring down a pitch right in the strike zone without swinging. (Yes, there's foul tips and dropped third strikes, but don't bother me with details while I'm trying to make a point.) To my Little League coach, the latter amounted to essentially a sin against Babe Ruth and all that is holy in Cooperstown - ya gotta stop thinking, take the chance, and get that Louisville Slugger off your shoulder rather than trudge back to the dugout wondering what might have been.

Similarly, carmakers can strike out either by releasing a vehicle that misses the mark entirely or by failing to produce a vehicle that would've sold in bonkers numbers, gone on to define an entire segment, and established that company as a leader among its peers. (Nobody on that long walk back to the dugout envisions themselves swinging at that called third strike and hitting a foul ball or a dribbler back to the pitcher - it's always a game-winning home run, right?) So let's take a moment today to consider which carmakers passed on the biggest missed opportunities over the years.

One reader opines, “Exner’s Hemi Falcon could have blown both Corvette and Thunderbird off the road, made Cunningham’s trips to Le Mans a bigger victory than any GT40, dominate just like a Petty Plymouth, show the market style earlier than a Mustang, stop any Duntov Gran Sport thinking, and be a production and race automobile superior to any hot rod Cobra or Daytona Coupe.”

The Falcon would indeed have competed with the Corvette and Thunderbird in the domestic two-seater performance car category, though as we've pointed out previously, it was not insignificantly larger than both of those cars and the only engine fitted to the two or three show cars was smaller than the other two cars' engines, so how it would have performed on the track and how it would have distinguished itself from its competition is up for debate. Of course, that's not to say there wasn't room for improvement. The Falcon's engine bay would likely have swallowed larger Hemi V-8s or even the later Bendix Electrojector-fitted Chrysler engines (in alternative histories, anything's possible!) with ease, and if initial sales came in strong, the Falcon could have been guaranteed at least another couple of generations, perhaps continuing on into the Sixties and the heart of the muscle car era. The only questions then are whether it would have gone down the four-seater path as the Thunderbird did, how or whether the Falcon would have influenced other performance cars to come out of Chrysler, and how the Falcon would have fared against European sports cars.

See how much fun that is? So tell us about the biggest missed opportunities in automotive history and give us your predictions on how the automotive landscape would have changed had those swing-and-a-misses been out-of-the-park four-baggers.