I've had enormous fun spotting this kind of stuff in New York. I love the way North American commercial vehicles look.
The design brief seems to be - these vehicles are going to be slow, they'll have to contain lots of stuff and it'd be good if it didn't show too much if a few accidents happened along the way. So they're basically square boxes on wheels, the anti-porsche.
This is pretty much what I'd ask for in a vehicle of my own, but they don't seem to make things like that for regular people. The closest I got was an old Land Rover Series III we used to have.
There's a completely different design vernacular for commercial vehicles over here, the least European things you could imagine. I think it's because US vehicles are designed to travel long-distances in straight lines and European vehicles are designed to go short distances and around lots of corners.
And this is fantastic. I think it's a sanitation vehicle, but it looks like you could set it to 'blow' instead of 'suck' and end up on Mars.
If I were a ghostbuster, Russell, I'd go for the last one!
Posted by: Ashish Banerjee | November 12, 2006 at 04:40 PM
The over-engineered aesthetic seems to extend to all kinds of things in New York; fire hydrants, mail boxes, the steel capping on the curbs - anything in the public domain looks like it could survive a really enthusiastic kicking. For years.
Posted by: Leo | November 12, 2006 at 06:58 PM