We're going to get weird this month. OK, maybe "weird" isn't the best word to use. How about "outlandish," "cutting edge," or "fascinating"? Typically, we cover one artist per issue, and the work tends to be vehicles that are creative, unique customs, or forward-looking OE concepts rendered by someone working on the outside of the auto industry and looking in. This time we snagged a couple of ideas from the creative studios of the largest automaker in the world.
GM's West Coast Advanced Design Studio won the top honor at the 2006 Design Los Angeles competition at the L.A. Auto Show for this expression of our future mobile lifestyle. Called the GMC PAD Living Activity Vehicle (LAV), it's an urban loft on wheels optimized for city sprawl. In DriveMode, the hybrid-diesel powertrain makes the best of fuel-efficient technologies to get you to work, the beach, or anywhere else your lifestyle demands that you be. Converting to LifeMode, the powertrain runs the multimedia goodies and actual essentials plugged into the vehicle's power grid. Resource management tech stretches fuel and water supplies for weeks or months. Solar panels in the SkyDeck help power the PAD's systems. And an electromagnetic suspension aids in leveling and stabilizing the PAD when it is stationary or on the go.
With walls doubling as television screens, a SkyDeck, and an all-in-one sitting, cooking, and sleeping space, the LAV is a near-fetched alternative for a generation priced out of today's so-called artist's lofts that hollow out previously abandoned office buildings in rapidly gentrifying downtowns across the country.
The GM design team consisted of Steve Anderson, Senon B. Franco III, Jay Bernard, Phil Tanioka, Sidney Levy, Brian Horton, Alessandro Zezza, Christine Ebner, and Frank Saucedo.
Check out this Hummer. (Yeah, it's a Hummer.) Called the HR (Hummer Roadster), it was shot from the rifled barrel of a howitzer, maybe, or radically built to run a 1,000-mile off-road race on...Mars! This two-seater concept was an entry in the 2005 Design Los Angeles at the L.A. Auto Show. It illustrates a high-speed, low-drag rendition of the all-terrain bad boy that many people love (and love to hate). Freed from the constraints imposed upon it by its martial roots and commercial expectations of what an SUV is supposed to be, the designer compressed the Hummer into a purer expression of what city-to-dirt performance ought to be.