WTF?! #8: The BamGoo That Looks Like a Poo
The last couple of WTF?! articles have been about stuff that really has been, well... kinda cool. Now it's no more Mr. Nice Guy. It's time to bring you more of the wierdest cars in the universe. And they don't come wierder than this. Quite a lot of electric powered concept cars are poor excuses for a car. But this concept, from the greatest minds of Kyoto university, no less, takes the cake. Because this electric car, which weighs only 60 kilograms and has a grand total of one seat, is made from panda food. I'm not joking.
The BamGoo, as it's unfortunately called, is made almost entirely from bamboo, and would make a perfect culinary snack for a hungry panda. The significance of it is that bamboo is one of the fastest growing materials on earth, making it, uh... thoroughly renewable. Forget the crash test safety, the fact is looks like a tumbleweed, and the car's odd tendency to blow over in a mild wind - this thing can go a total of 50 kilometres on one charge!!! That's incredible... NOT.
Even the woman in the picture below looks pretty embarassed. And so she should be - this is probably the dumbest and most impractical green car that's been created for quite a while, which is saying quite a lot. I've said it looks like poo, I've said it looks like a tumbleweed, but I've finally realised what it really looks like - this is a peanut on wheels.
WTF?! #1: Ergo to Renault - Don't design turds!
Some dipstick product guru at Renault thought, in 1999, that people would buy this.
They had high, high hopes for the Avantime (yes, it's not just you, it sounds homosexual to me too), hoping it would be the beginning of a new market niche: the luxury and comfort of a coupe with the style and flexibility of an Espace-type MPV. Except it took two years to get it properly into production, because it took ages for it to become safe (blame the pillarless design of Patrick Le Quement). By 2001, the wow-factor of such a drastically "different" car had well and truly worn off, and because Renault had to make it safer, they also had to make it uglier.
People also realised that this car doesn't fulfil its purpose - it's wasn't as cool looking as a normal coupe (as soon as you see the two-tone colour scheme, you tend to back away slowly), and it wasn't as practical as even a normal hatch, because it had only two doors. Even France, whose weird and fugly population usually lap up weird and fugly cars, snubbed the Avantime. And it didn't help that similarly priced premium hatch Renault Vel Satis (below) also entered the market in 2001. Imagine the showroom of a Renault dealer.
Customer: "I'd like something from your premium range of cars."
Dealer: "Well, would you like to have a look at our tastefully styled 4-door hatchback,
which will impress your friends, or would you like to have a look at our 2-door
fish on wheels, the Avantime, which will make all your friends die of heart
attacks caused by them laughing at how stupid you look in your car."
Customer: "Hmm... sounds like a tough decision, doesn't it? Well, I don't have any friends, so
I'll take a look at your Avantime."
The Avantime didn't win many friends either. Renault pulled the plug on the Avantime in 2003, only two years after launch, because it was losing so much money on this dog of a car. Only 8,545 were built.
It goes to show that when manufacturers design turds, they sell like turds. Nobody can remember how the Avantime drove, but didn't care, because they didn't want it. I'm the first person to advocate risky and original design, but the Avantime embodied everything that is wrong about "form over function" design - it just wasn't what people wanted, needed, or liked.
