Maria Del Camino: The Flying Car

(engine rumbles)

(light instrumental music)

The dream of a flying car,

it was a promise that was an unfulfilled promise

from childhood, that we would all be in flying cars by now,

and I'm convinced this is as close that I'll get

to a flying car in my lifetime.

(light instrumental music)

This is Maria Del Camino, and so she's

kind of a chimera Frankenstein between

a '59 El Camino and this Komatsu excavator

for the base, and then things are completely re-configured

and there's a custom boom assembly

that connects the two together.

And certainly the '59 El Camino

which is famous for the fins, and Harley Earl,

the designer at GM who was responsible

for the Cadillacs of the era and the lengthening,

lowering, widening of cars, tail fins and all that,

this was the last car he did for GM

and if there was ever a car that wanted to fly,

it was the '59 El Camino.

(light instrumental music)

So it was a five ton machine originally,

and actually Maria, in her complete form,

is still now five tons once again, so she's a big girl.

The holes are all hand drilled

and they form a half-tone image

of the false Maria from the film Metropolis.

And the basic premise

that started that whole idea was that

the car as I found it was a complete rust bucket,

and it was too far shot to be restored

into a car of any value, so the idea

was to take it the other direction

and turn her into a ghost of herself.

She's a beast.

And so I wanted to perforate the body,

and so then the question came up,

well, if I'm gonna perforate the body,

then what pattern would I use?

(engines rumbles)

I had always been inspired by the film Metropolis,

and the robot woman, or actually,

as Fritz Lang called it, the robot machine man,

but I call her the false Maria.

Hence the name Maria Del Camino.

Really the best thing about it and one of the reasons

I created it was to ride with friends,

a group of friends in the car,

and being up off the earth,

there's something quite sublime in that sense.

(light instrumental music)