Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. From the start, cars were built wrong. At least, that’s what Chrysler’s head of automotive research, Carl Breer, thought in 1930. Automobiles had never been built to be aerodynamic, he posited, and he was right. A few years earlier, he’d consulted aviation pioneer Orville Wright (the younger Wright brother) , who suggested he build a wind tunnel. The results were damning: Every car Breer tested was more aerodynamic running backward than forward . That’s because early cars were boxy behemoths, built like motorized carriages. At the time, Buckminster Fuller—American architect, designer, and futurist—was reaching a similar conclusion but from an altogether different angle. While reading Toward an Architecture , the 1923 manifesto of Swiss-French architect and theorist Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, Fuller encountered a table of wind resistance diagrams.…