Oktapodi was created in 2007 as a graduate project by a team of French students at the Gobelins L’Ecole de L’Image, a Parisian film school. It has gone on to win a number of awards and was even nominated this year for an Oscar in the animated short film category.

What makes the short such a treat even if you’re not a particular fan of cephalopods is the choice of vehicle to depict breakneck speed: the Vespa-based Piaggio Ape minitruck, featured here on Jalopnik a short while ago. In a genre where V8’s never hurt and tractor trailers can come in very handy, the truck in Oktapodi is equipped in real life with three to fifteen cubic inches of single cylinder power.

But Oktapodi shows that when it comes to flinging vehicles about with reckless abandon, it’s not the size of your engine that counts.

Source: Oktapodi.com

Looking like a cross between an Ape, a Venturi Eclectic and something from the video game Half-Life, the CarGo can transform from a pickup truck to compact van, folding up its pickup bed into a vertical storage bin. It can also tuck in its wheels to fit into very narrow spaces. Plus, it banks into corners.

It is strictly a rendering at the moment but it would be quite lovely if someone took to manufacturing it.

Image Credit: Adam Schacter Design

That’s ape as in Italian for honeybee, so think Apis mellifera instead of the superfamily Hominoidea and pronounce it ah-PEH. And don’t look for a V8 engine: the one in the Ape has a single cylinder of 3 (three) cubic inches. Upgrades are available which up that to a whopping fifteen, good for high-speed pizza deliveries followed by burnouts in the piazza.

The Ape you see here is from 1969. Its current owner purchased it in Naples, where it was used to deliver salami and cheese, just as intended. And like every proper Italian machine which stirs the heart, this one is mid-engined. So mid-engined, in fact, that all three cubic inches of that rat-tat-tat two-stroke little wonder are right beneath the bench you sit on. Flip it up and you can get your fingers dirty right away.

By the time this Ape was manufactured in 1969, the design was already two decades old. Similar to every tiny post-war European vehicle, it was borne out of necessity and poverty: another cheap, no-frills construction to get the economic heart of Europe pumping. The idea was Corradino D’Ascanio’s, the man who’s had a hand in everything from the Vespa to the Lambretta to the Agusta helicopter. In fact, the Ape is nothing but a Vespa with two rear wheels and a cabin.

They are clearly workhorse machines, a bit rough in places, but this cappuccino-colored panel van transcends its utilitarian roots to become a three-wheeled cube of desire. Both the size and the dimensions hit the cuteness receptor in the human brain with a mighty thud. Kids, as you can see, cannot resist at all.

The Ape is probably as alien a solution to the American idea of trucking as the occasional Ford F-250 is to a European inner city. But for its natural environment, the Ape is as close to perfection as it gets. Plus, it’s a motor scooter in the eyes of the law! You can park it wherever you wish—for free. And absolutely nothing beats that in a car-choked city center.

Special thanks to Misi Szilágyi of Stipistop for loaning us his Ape. Photography by Natalie Polgar and the author. And if you really need to know: that statue of a pair of mosquito-mayfly hybrids in the pictures is located in a playground on the Vérmező in Budapest, which translates to: The Field of Blood. It was named so after Hungarian revolutionary Ignác Martinovics and his men were beheaded there on May 20, 1795.