The other day we pointed out the flying Bugatti in the trailer for Neil Blomkamp's new movie, Elysium, and noted the tiny presence of what appeared to be a modified Nissan GT-R being flung into some trucks. Well, thanks to 808morgan over at Oppo, we now have a much better picture of the car. It's 140 years old but looks great.
Based on the image, we can clearly see the car is in fact a GT-R, heavily armored and seemingly de-saturated of all color. Things must really be bad on future-Earth if they're stealing the color from cars. There's also an opaque, armored windshield and a lot of equipment on the roof that suggests the car is modified for autonomous driving.
Seeing as how the movie is supposed to take place in 2154, the most remarkable thing is how Nissan is building cars that last and are drivable even at 140 or so years old. That looks like a fairly current GT-R, and it's safe to say that Nissan's not going to keep making GT-Rs like that too much longer, which would peg the age of that car right around 140.
Let's just be clear how old this is. If you wanted to make a self-driving armored attack vehicle out of a 140 year old car today, you'd be making it from the only existing 1873 Siegfried Marcus internal combustion engine car.
I'm all for making cars into crazy things in movies, but I think Blomkamp could have specified cars that would be a bit less archaic. But who knows, maybe there's a reason. Maybe the reason the earth is in such awful shape is that we started building cars that never died and the Pep-Boys-and-small-auto-repair-shop-based global economy collapsed.
Who knows? It's not like movies have never used 100+ year old cars as plot movers before.