No, that main image isn’t AI generated or Photoshopped. That’s just the latest creation of Tyler Fever and the rest of the team at the Prop Department Youtube channel. Tyler and his crew get up to all sorts of mad scientist shenanigans with equipment like robotic arms and high-power lasers, and this time they set out to build the thinnest, flattest car ever. As you can see, they’ve done it in convincing fashion, and it’s road legal to boot.
The build started with a scrapped Ford Festiva, essentially a badge-engineered Kia Pride. The old three-door subcompact hatchback had to be stripped down to bare metal before being cut, but the interior lining had started to rot away into a tough layer of gunk. They solved this issue by deploying liquid nitrogen to freeze the lining, then chipped away the frozen-solid material. Again, real mad scientist behavior going on here.
With the chassis ready for cutting, the Prop Department brought the lasers out to play. They used a laser tool to precisely measure and mark where their cuts were supposed to go, then used a high-power laser to slice through the steel and take away the whole middle part. What remained from the chassis were the literal sides of the car, just a bit past the A-pillars.
How do the boys put the two slices of the hatch back together? With more lasers, of course. Using a laser welder, the two ends of the car are stitched back together, and it’s here you can see that the precise measurement work pay off. The halves come together very cleanly, with the weld lines almost being invisible if you weren’t looking for them.
Next comes the problem of making the car move. The plan was to stuff a 20hp motor sourced from an electric dirt bike (which had handlebars wider than the whole car at this point, by the way) into the ‘hatch’ and send power to the rear wheels. Using both salvaged components and fabricated parts, a new custom suspension and transmission were put together and mounted onto the car, with the original wheels from the Festiva going back on.
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Slowly but surely, the project was coming together. They even went back to the tailgate and cut it like what they did the chassis to give the flattest car ever a proper rear. Other finishing details include a 3D-printed dashboard, reattached make and model badges, and a bright yellow paintjob.
The finished product is a surprisingly zippy, nearly two-dimensional vehicle that can drive through human-sized doorways. And somehow, it can carry a passenger out back. Testing showed that it essentially performs like a go-kart, although its high center of gravity means it’s prone to tipping onto one of its sides during hard steering.
The Prop Department crew then proceed to take it to town and show it off to friends and strangers, which you can watch here:
It’s a build that’s equal parts ridiculous and impressive. The effort to apply all the details to make it look like an astoundingly thin production car really elevates it above other crazy garage projects. Personally, I’d say it’s in the same league as the 1:2 scale GR Yaris we covered a while back… just much, much sillier.
How would you react if something like this pulled up next to you on EDSA? Let us know what you think of the flattest car ever in the comments.
