HAR! I actually went back and looked thru the links to find that “quote.”
The car is indescribable. Not ugly so much as grotesque.
It looks like something that should have a huge, nasty auger on the front and be used in the digging of tunnels. It looks like something that should be covered in gloppy brown sauce and served on a giant platter, surrounded by 400 gallons of sautéed onions. Most of all, it looks like something that should snap in half in the chubby hands of a Gargantuan four-year-old boy, and lie, disdained, in the immense toy box of history’s not-even-failures.
Doesn’t it look an awful lot like the alien invaders from Bloom County? I think they were from the planet Zort or some such place. I couldn’t find a picture on Google, but surely someone here knows what I’m talking about.
I hope like heck that someone buys that car and restores it. That car is just too weird to let it rust away into scrap metal. Something that unique must be preserved.
Opps! Sorry about that… I wasn’t trying to mislead, just being sarcastic. But the whole ‘prototype safety vehicle’ notion just boggles my mind. I have never in my life seen a car that looked less safe, even ones that were on fire. How does a person start with the concept of improving vehicle safety and end up with that? It’s as if the designer knew nothing about cars except through secondhand rumors and folklore-- maybe he’d seen one once, from a distance, and no one else in his village believed him, so he built that one to prove them wrong. That thing should have been dubbed “Sir Tandeth.”
It strikes me as simply alien– yes, there are a few recognizable design elements, but the overall concept is from a parallel Earth where automobile evolution took a wildly different path. Actually I find its ‘horse-and-carriage’ arrangement kind of charming, and could see how such an idea might make a weird sort of sense. After all, an accident is likely to damage either the front or back of a vehicle rather than both ends; so if the front end of your car were totaled, you could just purchase a new engine module. I envision a somewhat slower, more genteel and stately alternate history, where every family has one sturdy motorcarriage and one powerhorse, while the wealthy have an entire stable of finely tuned, exquisitely maintained motors to choose from: * “Harness up the Lambert 12-cylinder and bring my chariot around, James. I’m going out motoring.”*
That’s a fascinating idea, Terrifel. But the Sir Vival resembles a design from a not terribly-skilled madman stuck halfway between that universe and ours…
I can see where he was going with the death bubble. It does give you a 360 degree field of vision, so if you had a ring of eyes all the way around your head, you’d be able to see traffic coming at you from any direction. Which, I suppose, goes to support your “built by aliens” theory.