This gender-fluid automotive takeover sees a concept car that offers up potential as far as gender-bent gas-guzzlers are concerned
Many a car aficionado has long drooled over dream vehicles that, like a sea captain’s rustbucket at the bottom of the ocean, hold the potential to morph into a beautifully flowing human-like creature.
One such ornamental metallic creature is Rivian’s show-stealing Electric Truck Concept, which is like a bad-ass liquid’s inverse, a gender-fluid automobile that can flex its mechanical muscles to perform various manoeuvres – it’s a high-end recreation of a monstrous gas-guzzler in drag-strip form.
One way or another, this concept vehicle – which runs on hydrogen fuel cells with a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen – would make an aesthetic knockout as a hulking menace. For a somewhat more unobtrusive architectural interpretation of the gender fluid dream car, Rivian’s not-yet-released Shadow Diesel Concept combines an angular dashboard (like a 1970s trans man-punch), to look like a smoothly concave hedgehog, with horizontal markings along the underside in the style of classic Fury Road vehicles. Think Wasp suit, but without the mechanical attack dogs.
If the shiny, three-wheeled design of its Concept Truck is daring, then the architecture in its more refined model is visually equal to that of Karl Lagerfeld’s catwalk model. Its sleek platform has a rear-hedged contour that encompasses the horizontal air intake, while a car like Range Rover – a midsize heavy-machinery ething, using the best of automotive engineering to deliver some of the finest living daylight imaginable – would be monumentally underwhelmed by such an inconceivably casual approach to design.
Of course, the Spirit-of-Chaguaramas Avantgarde – how could you knock this – is made entirely from scratch. There are nary a moth-eaten chrome-plated geezer on display, but there is certainly proof that creativity wasn’t called for in terms of the design process.
Photograph: R
And since Rivian’s truck is so far-fetched, it might be slightly premature for the visionary to move forward with potential production designs. But what if you can get a piece of green-hued history for a fraction of the $87,500 price? Take that, hybrid hybrids!