General Motors has opened a new advanced design studio in Pasadena, California, and to celebrate, it has unveiled two rather cruel Hummer concepts that really want us to go away. Sorta.
The concepts were designed under the banner ‘the courage to get lost,’ with a Hummer pickup and SUV transformed into very chunky rock crawlers.
“Every great concept starts with a belief. Ours was this: the courage to get lost leads us to new discoveries,” said outgoing GM Advanced Design Pasadena studio director Brian Smith. Side note: He’s off to rejoin the Corvette design team in Michigan, with Hussein Al Attar taking over as boss of the new Pasadena studio.
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“The team rallied around a working mantra of ‘take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints,’ and let that philosophy guide every decision,” said Smith. “That’s not just a tagline—it’s the design brief.”
With their cropped bodywork and giant tires, the X concepts are apparently built around four pillars: reconfigurability, capability, community, and sustainability.
The cockpits feature stackable screens with custom displays, while something called ‘FLEX FAB’ apparently enables small batch construction for metal parts without the need for stamping tools. Yep, much like 3D printing. There’s also a focus on replacing glues with snap fits and mechanical fasteners which would allow owners to swap interior bits, while the seat backs and instrument panel ends are made from recycled car grilles.
There are 35-inch Goodyear tires on the pickup and 37-inch monsters on the SUV, with the coupe-ified car also getting 18-inch beadlock wheels. Underneath, both get fancy Multimatic shocks and ‘serious underbody protection.’ Oh, and the wheel arches are removable.
That’s not all in terms of off-road creds though, because both concepts also feature a ‘scout drone’ that can “fly ahead on the trail, feed real-time terrain data back to the vehicle, and land and dock itself when not in use.”
The X concepts were a collaboration between GM Advanced Engineering, Advanced Manufacturing, and the Advanced Design Pasadena studio. The latter’s new campus apparently measures some 13,800sqm across three buildings, which should mean there’s just about enough space to park these two Hummer concepts up.
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
