| Wednesday, March 12, 2008 |
22:58 - You're crampon my style
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9888721-1.html?%5E$
|
(top) |
Man, some people just can't take a joke.
Somehow, a reporter for Road & Track got to test the Mach 5, the car from the upcoming Speed Racer movie. We got to see the Mach 5 at the Detroit auto show, although the one we saw looked like a nonfunctional mock-up. Some of the features and specs covered in the Road & Track article seem fictional, such as the "crampons" that are supposed to wrap around the tires for better traction. But the article includes pictures of things such as the saw blades that pop out from the front, so we're not really sure what to believe.
Me, I'd go with the "This last part, and much of everything else, is a re-creation of what may happen in a Speed Racer episode and the upcoming movie. As for driving a real Mach 5, I'll just have to keep pretending" at the end. Plus the explicit acknowledgment that the "photos" are all CG, which makes fake-outs like this absurdly easy these days, even when it's not April Fool's and they're just doing "speculative renderings" of wat upcoming cars "might" look like, often based on nothing but the CG artist's imagination.
Road & Track has a nasty habit of relying on "digital illustrations" to such a degree that you can't even tell which photos are real anymore; it's only picked out (if you're lucky) by a fine-print caption somewhere. (One of the reasons why I prefer Automobile these days; their material tends to be a lot more authentic, even when that puts them at a disadvantage in reporting rumors of upcoming models.) But being a magazine, at least they have the luxury of presenting their April Fools' fakeouts well in advance of April, so nobody has their guard up yet.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
