Something like this had never been seen in the history of cinema and the car: a large production house and an engine giant work together to design a car. But that will never be present in the film.
This is the story of the Mercedes Vision Avtr which was designed in collaboration between Mercedes and Lightstorm Entertainment, the Californian company of James Cameron which has produced almost all of the director’s films since 1990 today, from Terminator 2 to The Abyss to Titanic and , above all, the groundbreaking 2009 Avatar and its sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, which will be released in theaters on December 16th.
Mercedes-Benz VISION AVTR, the car of Avatar
But why work so hard and then not make the prototype debut in the film? The reason is simple: all the human machines we see on Pandora are brutal and destructive military vehicles that tear apart the planet’s ecosystem by the will of human multinationals and therefore nobody wanted Mercedes to make this impression.
Here, then, is an Avatar-inspired car, to the future, just to show what the road to future mobility will be. With a combined engine power of over 350 kW, the Vision Avtr sets a new benchmark for Plug-in Hybrids. Thanks to the intelligent and fully variable torque distribution, the power of the four fully individually controllable engines is managed in the best possible way in terms of driving dynamics, but above all highly efficiently. Not only that: the innovative all-wheel drive with torque vectoring allows you to do things never seen before because here each wheel can be moved separately and depending on the driving situation.
In practice, thanks to the possibility of managing the front and rear axles simultaneously or in opposite ways, VISION AVTR can move laterally by about 30 degrees, unlike conventional vehicles. The so-called “crab movement” gives the concept vehicle a reptile-like appearance even in its movement…
The Mercedes-Benz Vision AVTR was first revealed as a concept car at CES 2020, but today it’s a fully functional prototype. Of course, it goes slowly (maximizes 60 hours), but it works in every detail.
The whole project started in 2018, about a year after the start of production of “La via dell’acqua”. Mercedes automotive designers collaborated with film production designers to create Pandora’s creatures, environments, sets and effects; both teams visited each other’s studios in Germany and California. Mercedes saw thousands of projects from Weta FX, which handles all visual effects for the new film.
That’s why the design of the Vision AVTR was inspired by the nature of Pandora, the planet where Avatar takes place: here the Na’vi ride on incredible flying creatures called banshees, which provided the inspiration for the AVTR’s overall shape. The spherical wheels have a whimsical look, with the illuminated sections reminiscent of the woodsprites of Pandora’s sacred tree. The thirty-three individually controlled rear flaps move organically as you drive the AVTR, like gills or bristling wings. Pandora then is covered in bioluminescent fauna, so the AVTR’s cabin is filled with lights.
A madness that we will never see on the road? Absolutely not: already now some elements present on the AVTR have been introduced in the EQ series models of Mercedes, such as the overall single-arch silhouette, the slim front and rear lights and the large panel of the fake grille. So let’s get ready for the car that maneuvers like a crab.