It looks like today is ending up a bit more art-car heavy than usual, with today’s Shitbox Showdown featuring a really strange and crusty-looking Ford Ranger art car, and now here I am about to show you one more. That’s okay; it’s good for you to have dense art-car injections into your psyche at times. It’s all part of a balanced automotive diet. This one I especially like because I’m not so sure it’s an art-car so much as it is a nearly literal car-costume. I’ve always been amused by the concept of hypothetical car costumes and this seems to be one of the most literal examples I’ve ever seen. It’s a big Glam Tank of some sort — the kind you’d expect to see firing glitter rounds into crowds of drab-clad Normies as the Fashonista Resistance Army takes another hill, sending hordes of lamé-clad sexy warriors onto the runways of victory. This particular one seems to have been built for Burning Man goings-on, so let’s just look at this, and don’t peek at that link until you try to guess what’s under there.
Let’s get a good look at this thing first:
Pretty impressive looking tank, in a shiny, low-polygon way. Like a Cybertruck tank, kind of, or maybe kind of like a real-world version of one of the tanks from the old Atari arcade game Battlezone?
Well, maybe not so much Battlezone, until you see how this thing looks at night:
Now it definitely has a sort of vector-scan Battlezone feel!
The ad notes that the turret of the tank rotates a full 360°, with the seller describing it like this:
Turn-key art car! Registered and ready to hit the desert for this yrs burn ???? Comes with 3000 watt sound system, cdj, amps, subs and speakers. Turret rotates 360 degrees. We’ve had 25 people on it and their bikes no problem. Core vehicle underneath is a very reliable REDACTED. No mechanical issues ensuring many more years of on playa play!
I took out what’s under there because, remember, we’re here to guess. Because that’s fun! Here’s a little hint where you can see some of the car this is based on:
Got a hint? Okay, I’m going to reveal the car it’s based on now, but really what excites me about this isn’t so much the car as it is the method used to turn it into a tank-based art car:
Yes, that’s just a boring old 2005 Chevy Trailblazer, complete with inline six motor (it might be a V8) [Editor’s Note: How are you going to call the vehicle with what was for many years America’s last non-diesel inline-six boring? -DT]., and it appears that just about nothing has been done to it save for building the tank around it. Usually art car builds involve extensive body modifications and removal of the original factory bodywork, but here it just looks like that whole new structure is just sitting on top of the Trailblazer.
It’s a costume for a car! It’s kind of amazing that way. Anyway, if you really want a Trailblazer dressed up as a tank, you can have this one for (checks ad, spit take) $15,000! Really? Damn.
Well, it is a one-of-a-kind art project, so that’s something. And I’m sure you’d be guaranteed a good time wherever you dragged this thing? If you have too much money and a crippling lack of big silver tank-like things, I guess mazel tov?
Knock a decimal place off of that, and I would soooo daily that thing. Has to be more reliable than a 240k BMW.
The Price is Right sad trombone sound played in my head as I scrolled to find a Trailblazer.
This is why I don’t like surprises.
I’m not surprised. This is pretty much the styling direction of most pickups and SUVs these days.
Perfect for cosplaying Tank Girl
So sad they were smart enough to put that thing together, but too stupid to dress properly for the pictures atop it.
I thought there was something weirdly long about the wheelbase, and I was right. Those Trailblazers were oddly proportioned. I always recoil a little when I see one.
“Guess the vehicle underneath” would be a fun series, especially because the next Burning Man is coming up at the end of August
There’s a lot of large art cars at Burning Man, and I’ve had a lot of fun trying to figure out what’s underneath. One particular art car, Icarus, I only knew what it was because I asked the driver what it was.
This one was far more obvious, though
Judging from the the lead image alone, I was thinking copious amounts of drugs.
Well, it does say “next year’s Burn” right on the tin, so yeah. Drugs.
The picture of it on the asphalt confirms my suspicion that this is the next frontier in the war on visibility. We have been making cars bigger and bigger, with corresponding bigger blind spots. Then there were the Carolina Squat pioneers, who thought that staring 45 degrees into the atmosphere was the best way to maximize the danger a driver can pose to his or her environment. This tank really is the next logical step – complete blindness.
Looks better than anything Russia has brought our this year.
Tanks, but no tanks.
Is GM tanking again?
On the next episode of P1-MP My Ride…
Was so hoping it was a Changli.
4 or 6 Changlis strapped together would be hilarious.
Is the Stellantis Hurricane powered by diesel? Is it un-American somehow? Are there more or less than six cylinders, or are they arranged some other way than in a straight line???
Stellantis isn’t American.
They aren’t anything really, they’re some sort of Anglo-Dutch-Franco-Italian-American chimera
Oh, well, formerly the last!
I made a deeply stupid comment here, and deleting outright isn’t an option, so this edit instead lies here as a token of my late-in-the-workday moronic tendencies.
Kinda disappointed it wasn’t a Bond Bug…
Sure, the headline did specify that it was a SUV but it’s hard to resist making references to Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder…