Right now I'm writing this with blood dripping from my nose because when I first saw this image of Honda's tiny kei-class pickup and its little, impeccably-designed camper, I leapt at my screen in an instinctive attempt to get to the car. Of course, I impacted the monitor hard, and fell off the back of my desk, legs kicking uselessly in the air.
My admiration for Honda's N-Box Slash is no secret, and it seems that whoever at Honda is in charge of monitoring the implant in my head has been paying extra-special attention lately, because they've turned the N-Slash into a tiny, glorious pickup truck, and expanded the N/ novel design language into a lovely little camping trailer. The concept is called, creatively, theN-TRUCK/N-CAMP.
These concepts were made for the Japan CampingCar Show 2015, which is now high on my list of places I'd like to teleport to in the upcoming few weeks.
It's unlikely this camper or even the pickup version of the N/ will make it to production, but there's actually plenty of Kei-class tiny campers around. There's a nice roundup of some of these here, and it's not like there's no history of Japanese insane tiny pickup trucks made from chopped-down boxy cars, after all.
I'm not entirely sure just what it is about cars like this I find so appealing, but it's there. The maniacal levels of space-utilization in that camper are somehow incredibly satisfying, and I would happily daily that little truck, and get an absurd thrill of unlikely utility every time I crammed something useful in that short but I bet still usable bed.
So, congratulations again, Honda. You've made something else I think is fantastic, and now have even less of a chance of ever having anything remotely like it. A sleeping bag in a Fit just isn't going to cut it, either.
Thanks a lot.