Oh, God, the guilt: A Hummer that turns CO2 to oxygen
Say what you like about the L.A. Auto Show - they know how to serve up the eye candy.
Last year's Design Challenge - exploring some fevered hallucination about "the L.A. lifestyle" - tried to persuade us that Los Angeles needs rolling film festivals and CNG-powered drift cars.
This year they're bypassing the nutritional value of plain nuts and going straight for the gooey nougat center - biodegradable dune buggies, oxygen-spewing plant-mobiles and nanotech-driven aqua-pods ...
Visually, my favorite has to be the Mercedes-Benz REcy (see below) - which manages to put a vintage varnished-teak Chris-Craft speeboat on recyclable mag wheels.
But I also admire the Hummer guilt trip, and thrill to the utter balls of the VW team's decision to base its entire vehicle on technology that most science fiction writers can't even agree will work.
Concept cars are supposed to speak to your inner 12-year-old. They don't have to use real technology - or even make sense. Just so long as they're cool and look like something you'd enjoy driving 15 years from now when a) you're old enough and b) the initial wicked design finally dribbles out of the lawyer pipe looking something vaguely like a watered-down PT Cruiser.
This year's L.A. Auto Show Design Challenge entrants seem to be indulging our inner 5-year-olds - with barely a passing nod to the feasibility of the science involved.
Would you haggle for 5 hours and three days with a ruthless car salesman just for the chance to pay too much for bucket seats and tinted windows in one of these?
Acura FCX 2020 LeMans: Nanotech is a big fetish with this year's contestants. Never mind that it's barely stable in the laboratory so far, or that hydrogen-cell fueling stations haven't been mainstreamed to the point where a pit crew boss with a big can of H could just pump it into his beast during a 20-second stop.
But hey, nanotech's cool, it's very "next" and so it simply must be PART OF OUR JOYLESS BATMOBILE RIPOFF!
Audi Dynamic Space Frame: I'll have whatever these guys are smoking.
They propose to make the frame a single integrated fluid-electrical component so that 1) all fluid and electrical channels are integrated within the frame; 2) ride suspension control is a series of hollow, fluid-filled chambers whose behavior is controlled by electrical current; 3) It has a hydraulic fluid drive instead of a driveshaft; and 4) Everything's made of a single material.
All these high-falutin' syllables boil down to a) An R and D budget the size of the U.S. Defense Department's quarterly "Pacifying Baghdad" line item and b) instant catastrophic failure the first time your main pump or electrical system blows out, leaving you freewheeling, driveless and brakeless while dropping your chassis to the pavement for an extra-grindy tour of the street surface.
But think how amazing you'll look when it happens.
GMC Hummer 02: The GMC team entry seems wracked with guilt.
Distraught over the damage their rolling bunkers are doing to the environment, they turned in a featherlight toy built of fully recycled aluminum and lined with phototropic, algae-filled body panels that transform CO2 into pure oxygen.
The poster (click the panel at the right) touts it as "The Hummer that BreathsTM.""We are each responsible for a damaging and non-productive "carbon footprint" - the effect our daily lives have on the earth's environment," they mew, in the deepest of self-abasing humilty. Of course, the carbon footprint of today's average H2 now resembles an enormous black sneaker the size of Abilene and would - even in the unlikely event of such a crack-pipe dream making it to mass-production - crush every single oxygen molecule pumped out by even 100,000 of these fragile little butterflies with a steady diet of CO and nonorganic particulates.
(Memo to self: check the remake rights on Silent Running and consider restaging it as an eloi-versus-morlocks demolition derby between 100,000 O2s and a single blinged-out H2. Call Samuel Jackson's people.)
Honda Extreme: Another Batmobile crib job (holy dual-cocoon cockpit!) that nonetheless has its heart in the right place. The Extreme is meant to be a recyclable vehicle with a reconfigurable honeycomb polycarbonate chassis that lets you change body styles according to your need.Honda envisions a string of "Honda Sustainability Centers" servicing the many (doubtless, expensive) body-change requests from buyers of this vehicle.
Very forward-looking, but please, can we have a moratorium on the use of the brand "Extreme" for approximately 50 years, by which time it will sound "edgy" again? Thank you.
Kia Sandstorm: Hybrid, hybrid, hybrid: bioelectric diesel with fully-rechargable NiMH battery system, a solar-powered coolerator and, uh, built-in recycling bins.Shave off an angle or two, and this CG-concoction looks suspiciously like a '69 VW dune buggy but ... never mind.
"Eco-fashionistas can easily recycle the polyethylene Terephthalate panels for a new look," coos the description. "And whether the top is up or down, green living has never been so sporty ... The Kia Sandstorm allows its driver to feel the renewable energy - their own."
Sorry, you lost me at "eco-fashionistas."
Mercedes-Benz REcy: This is one of the most sumptuous, least practical designs: The car is 100% recyclable (good, good) with laminated wood body panels that can be swapped out for whatever the tech-surface fetish rules the moment (e.g. carbon fiber, anodized aluminum, laquered tortillas, etc.).
Nothing wrong with the fragility of varnished hardwood coachwork that a nice Bokhara or Persian carpet couldn't cure - but how recyclable could laminate wood be?
Who cares. I already want one. Slick - and believable.
Mini BioMoke: Totally sick, as the kids like to say.
This open-cockpit kit-car's body is made of "a single sheet of biodegradable sandwich paneling impregnated with palm tree seeds. As the BioMoke ends its five year lifecycle, its body composts to promote tree growth and clean the air."
"Ends its five year lifecycle." That sounds so benign. The message is, "have a great time tearassing around the dunes ... until your car starts to rot out from underneath you." But it does look trick, doesn't it?
Toyota RLV (Renewable Lifestyle Vehicle): This is a snappy flight of fancy: a two-seat tandem superlight that runs on electricity (somehow sucking power from an invisible, weightless set of batteries) until you want to take it out on the Venice boardwalk. At that point, you switch off the juice, collapse the telescoping axles to narrow the car's stance, and start pedaling.
The Toyota Calty team's premise is that "Most 'Angelenos' agree that only two speeds exist in LA: 5 and 75 mph."
Right. We also agree that anything with wicker and bio-plastic seats and floorboards made of bamboo and aluminum is probably about as durable and safe in a crash (snap-up rollbars or not) as your average Big Wheel.
Volkswagen Nanospyder: This one completely takes the cake for sheer audacity: "a vehicle capable of being assembled, disassembled and reassembled on a microscopic level."
Of course, it relies on bleeding-edge nanotech theory of the free-form-hey-whatcha-smokin' brand favored by the Audi design team (above).
And it posits a world in which - a) you even want a car made of nanomachines; b) you want a car that will suddenly jump in (with you aboard) to help other nanomachine vehicles form vast, inscrutable underwater structures (see the "panel" illustration at the right); and c) they've overcome the whole gray goo thing.
But - again - very, very pretty.
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Monday, October 23, 2006 - 10:14 AM
