You ever have something stupid in your head and you can’t shake it until you, in some way, see it through? I feel like an embarrassing number of my life decisions are the result of this and, just so you know, so is this post. You see yesterday I saw a picture of a side view of a Porsche 911 in passing, and my brain somehow misinterpreted it as a picture of a weird cab-forward pickup truck. I couldn’t get the image out of my head, so here we are.
Just so we’re all on the same starting point, this is roughly what the picture I saw looked like:
Nothing weird, just a classic 911. Maybe it was the amber rear marker lamps or something that triggered my image-confusion, but for a brief, glorious moment, I read this backward, with the rear as the front and the front as the rear, and the trunk becoming a truck bed.
It was sort of like that old Dodge Deora concept truck from the ’60s. You know, this one:
I realised my mistake before the image even finished scrolling past, but the idea stuck with me: what if there was a reversed-911 pickup truck? It could be front-engine/front-wheel drive, kind of like how Volkswagen flipped their rear-engine/rear-drive formula for the Basistransporter and Hormiga pickup trucks.
This is what I think such a weird beast might look like:
See where I was coming from now? This would make a pretty slick little FWD, unibody pickup truck. It’s hard to look at that, I know, since the 911 form is so ingrained in our minds, but stick with me, here.
Here’s how I imagine the general interior layout might be:
I’m not certain if any pickups ever used a vertical gas tank like that, but it seems to be fairly well-protected there, as long as you don’t puncture it with something in the bed, so if you’re transporting harpoons, maybe let the pointy end go out the back.
I feel like to really get this out of my system, I need to make at least one more view, here, so let’s imagine what this may look like from a front-quarter view:
Hey! I kinda like that! I mean, yeah, it’s pretty weird, but I think it has a certain appeal. Would Porsche just elbow-bend those exhaust pipes backward like that, or would that create too much back pressure?
I think there’d be plenty of air intake for the engine this way, and traction should be pretty good — certainly better than a similar RWD pickup, at least, especially unladen.
I’m not saying that this is a good idea, but I’m not going to lie — I feel better for having gotten it out of my system, and into the world.
Thanks for indulging me.