Here’s a design from Nissan that might leave you asking yourself, "Why?"
Engineers at Nissan sawed the back half off a Leaf electric car and bolted the bed from a Frontier pickup in its place to create a one-of-a-kind shop car.
[seealso slug="electric-car-race-crash"]
It’s cherry-red, with rounded corners and, if you tilt your head and squint, it looks a bit like a shoe on wheels.
The engineers at Nissan call it Sparky.
Asking why it exists is the wrong question. Instead, Nissan says, “This team thinks a lot about, ‘Why not?’”
"I needed a project for a team-building activity so we can bring the team together,” said Nissan's Roland Schellenberg in a video posted on YouTube by the company last week.
Sparky acts as a support vehicle for Nissan’s Technical Center in Stanfield, Arizona. Engineers there put cars through their paces in hot temperatures, on a range of road courses and a high-speed oval.
Nissan doesn’t appear to have plans to apply any of Sparky’s Frankencar traits to production vehicles — but this is hardly the first time engineers there have had fun with designs.
We covered the 2020 GT-R earlier this year, which was a theoretical supercar in racing game Gran Turismo before Nissan turned it into an actual concept car.
In May, Nissan also crammed the V6 engine from its GT-R racer into a Juke crossover chassis, as you can see in the video below.
If nothing else, Sparky is probably more practical than that.