The passion for motor vehicles starts early. Little kids love to push toy vehicles around, projecting their dreams through their fingertips. Kids’ TV hammers that passion home. Forty years ago this was done by shows like Captain Scarlet and The Thunderbirds. Now the role is perfomed by Roary The Racing Car and Lightning McQueen. You could read this as a seedy conspiracy on behalf of the entertainment industry and the military-industrial complex to snare young minds and souls into a lifetime of drudgery and enslavement to the wage – or you could read this as meaning that motor vehicles tweak something essential in our deep-lying psyche. I reckon there’s something in both views. There are few auto enthusiasts who can’t especially dig the thought of being able to move out across the landscape at absolute will – particularly in the sort of snowbound conditions that we have been burdened by of late. Go to the alpine areas of the planet and you can see how humans have prepared to boldly go where no vehicle has gone before. Securing snowbound oilfields in Siberia may not be at the top of the agenda these days – it’s mostly about mining the lucrative potential for leisure activities. The Pisten Bully is the commercial cream of the snow-creeping crop, and lays down untold horsepower and manoeuvrability whilst applying minimal ground pressure. These babies are able to not only move across the most extreme terrain to maintain power and leisure infrastructure, but to sculpt that terrain into snowparks, half-pipes and all manner of fun things. Pistenbully has cornered the market in Europe with incredibly simple operating systems combined with mind bending engineering. Nodwell, on the other hand, was an early US manufacturer of snow mobile vehicles (like the one pictured above) that simply made supercool objects straight outta Mad Max. But for pure hammer-and-spanner, evil genius panache Russian manufacturer ZiL take the cake. Their spookily named, terrifying looking ‘29061’ model from the Soviet mid-seventies was driven by corkscrews and could crush everything in its path. Perfect for the contemporary oligarch looking into salt mine investment opportunities. We doubt the manufacturers and designers were over bothered about emissions regulations. MWAHHAHHAAHHHAAAAA!
If you fancy one of these I’m sure Adrian Flux will give it a go insuring it, call 0800 089 0050.
