A historical artifact should tell you about the time and culture it comes from. And indeed the accompanying photograph of a Ford Motor Company concept car called the Lincoln Futura, which was never mass-produced, illuminates some of the contours of American society one decade after V-E Day.

Painted in “Pearlescent Frost-Blue White,” the Futura almost shouts mid-1950s. It was designed at the dawn of the space age, of speed and streamlining, and it almost looks as if it could take off from Earth. The Futura’s main stylist, Bill Schmidt, later explained that he modeled the car’s louche, aggressive fins on those of the mako sharks and manta rays he had seen while scuba-diving in the Bahamas.

The car’s huge size (19 feet long) and limited passenger space (accommodating only two people) were a flamboyant advertisement for America’s post-World War II affluence. With its chief traditional economic competitors crushed by the war, the United States was booming; some myopic analysts did not foresee that this phenomenon would last only until America’s rivals got up off their knees. The Futura was clearly aimed at people with plenty of money and leisure time; it does not look like transportation for your commute to the farm or factory.

The car’s gas mileage would probably have been horrendous, consistent with a postwar America that presumed oil would remain relatively plentiful and cheap. That was also the premise of one of the most important pieces of domestic legislation passed by Congress in the 1950s: the interstate highway act, which shunted proposed mass transit projects to the side and gave national-security priority to a cross-country network of expressways. This encouraged Americans to buy cars, cars and more cars.

If you and your passenger rode down a city street under the Futura’s bubble top, you might feel as if you were on public display like an American president. And, sure enough, the most famous bubble top of the 1950s belonged to Dwight D. Eisenhower; it was mounted on his custom-built Lincoln parade car for motorcades through rain, freezing temperatures or snow. (In November 1963, when John F. Kennedy rode through the streets of Dallas, the bubble top on his own Lincoln — which might have, at least, interfered with that day’s rifle fire — was absent.)

The Futura concept car was built for about $250,000 — more than $2 million today. Promoted as “an exciting peek into America’s automotive future” and the most “revolutionary” car of the decade, it was unveiled at the Chicago Auto Show in January 1955. Then, in New York City, one of Henry Ford’s grandsons, Benson Ford, took the vehicle for a spin from Tavern on the Green in Central Park to a CBS studio on Broadway, where it was featured on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which was sponsored by Ford’s Lincoln-Mercury division.

As it turned out, however, Lincoln’s “dream car” did not foreshadow very much of the nation’s roadway destiny. Two years after the Futura’s unveiling, the United States began to suffer from its most punishing recession since the Great Depression. From 1957 to ’58, sales of automobiles dropped by one-third.

By then, American car companies weren’t scrambling to invent new luxury products — the Futura, in that climate, was a white elephant on wheels. Instead, they were looking to new “compact” cars, like the 1960 Ford Falcon, which could do battle with popular new imports like the Volkswagen Beetle from West Germany.

Here the Futura’s story would have ended, except that in 1965, ABC television greenlighted a new series called “Batman,” and its producers needed a Batmobile — fast.

Within three weeks, using blowtorches and saws, the automobile customizer George Barris transformed the Futura’s deteriorating concept car — which he had bought from Ford for a dollar — into a rakish roadster suitable for TV’s new Batman and Robin (played by Adam West and Burt Ward).

The car was repainted in black and fluorescent red; its tail fins were expanded into batwings, and its grille retooled to resemble a bat’s face. Mr. Barris was asked to add other features like the “Batscope,” the “Bat-Ray projector mechanism” and twin “Bat chutes.” He installed a propane furnace that would let the new Batmobile’s tail spit flames and smoke.

“The car,” Mr. Barris later told The New York Times, “had to be a star in its own right.”

On the second Wednesday night in January 1966, ABC broadcast the first episode of “Batman” in the time slot previously occupied by “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” the Eisenhower-era staple. With the 1950s being supplanted by the 1960s, the Futura had morphed into the Batmobile.

And as “Batman” became a television hit, the old Futura — the avatar of a future that never arrived — was finally transformed, albeit in a very different incarnation, into the American pop culture icon that Ford executives had once hoped it would be.

In 2013, after a brisk auction, Mr. Barris sold his Batmobile to an unidentified collector for more than $4 million.

As Robin would have exclaimed: “Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!”