Let’s be realistic—humankind isn’t going to colonize the moon anytime soon. But when it does, Lexus is ready and waiting to supply the vehicles we’ll need to traverse the rocky lunar landscape.
Well we say ‘ready’—we doubt Lexus is seriously developing any of the ideas it submitted to Document Journal’s Lunar Design Project. The journal asked designers and architects from around the world to imagine how humans might live on the moon—the seven concepts here are the company’s idea of how we might get around.
First comes the Zero Gravity concept—a motorcycle of sorts that uses ‘magnetic levitation” technology to glide over the moon’s surface at more than 480kph. Then we have the Lexus Cosmos—a “transportation concept” with an observatory and various other spaces. It’s the VW Grand California of space travel.
The Bouncing Moon Roller looks fun, like one of those big plastic balls people roll down steep hills in for fun. The cockpit and the batteries stay upright, as the graphene nanotube outer bubble rolls, jumps, and bounces you across the moon’s surface.
The Lexus Lunar Cruiser is quite conventional-looking. Well, to a point. The large tires flip up like the Back to the Future DeLorean, so the concept can flit about like a drone. Meanwhile, the Lexus Lunar Mission is the company’s idea of the craft that will transport people to the moon from a presumably apocalyptic Planet Earth.
The Lunar Moon Racer is a single-seat buggy, in which the sole occupant sits in a glass bubble. “You can jump, climb, race, and discover the entire moon,” says Lexus. Sounds very us, doesn’t it? PCOTY 2089, here we come.
Finally we have the Lexus Lunar, a big, six-wheel rover with a separate living compartment that can be split from the chassis beneath to “create the start of a lunar colony.”
Fancy bouncing around the moon on one of these things?
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
