There are a handful of cars so iconic that, when the design studio rolls out a new one, you know what it is before you see the badge. The Ford Mustang. The Jeep Wrangler. The Batmobile. The Chevrolet Corvette. These are known instantly around the world on sight, even when designers make a radical change like moving the engine behind the driver, as two of those four have recently done.
Yes, one is the C8 Corvette. The other is the caped crusader’s latest ride.
Home-Built Batmobile
There’s a new Batman in theaters, and he has new wheels. With really, really fat tires.
Robert Pattinson stars in director Matt Reeves’ new take on America’s richest troubled goth kid, “The Batman.” And, like every take on the disturbed billionaire in a winged suit, this one gets a new car.
“The Batman” shows us a rookie superhero, with Bats hand-building an early version of his trademark suit and his trademark car.
As befits someone just setting out in their quest to rid Gotham of quirky themed bad guys, the latest take on the Batmobile is probably the least advanced ever put on film. Here there’s none of the early self-driving tech of the Tim Burton batmobile nor the mil-spec armor of the Christopher Nolan films.
Instead, Pattinson’s Bats drives a homemade muscle car. Its most high-tech feature is a bumper.
Related: 2022 Little Tikes Cozy Coupe Gets Updated Look, Special Editions
Inspired by a Dodge Charger, Not Built From One
Production designer James Chinlund says he and director Reeves conceived of the car as something “meant to intimidate, it has to be like a monster.”
But it had to start low-budget, as something a young Bruce Wayne could have built by himself.
It’s based on a late 60s Dodge Charger — something this version of Wayne raced as a teenager.
Standard practice in Hollywood is to build fictional cars from real cars. Hollywood design studios have bought 1990s Chevy Cavaliers by the thousands and built a cottage industry in remaking them into nearly every fictional car you’ve ever seen on the big screen.
But production designers didn’t build the car used in the film from a Cavalier, a classic Charger, or any other donor car. Designers started from scratch with their own custom chassis.
It’s quite hard to find a well-lit photo of the 2022 Batmobile for some reason
The bodywork is custom and includes that brutal bumper welded directly to the steel frame to act as a battering ram. The cabin was spare, with just one seat (this Bats isn’t rescuing Vicky Vale just yet). It’s an off-the-shelf Corbeau racing seat you could order from your local auto parts shop.
The steering wheel, too, is a catalog item. It’s an OMP wheel matching the one used on BMW Z3s.
Four Built – Each For a Different Purpose
Producers built four Batmobiles, each used to film different aspects of the film’s central chase scene.
They used an off-the-shelf V8 to power most of them. Producers won’t say which crate engine they used but claim it’s good for 700 horsepower with a pair of added turbochargers. Motor Biscuit claims it’s a Ford Triton V10.
Power runs through an off-the-shelf manual transmission and transfer case to all four wheels. It can re-route some fuel to the “thruster” to shoot flames out the back. Unlike in the film, this does nothing to speed up the car.
One of the four, however, borrowed much of its electric drivetrain from a donor Tesla (producers didn’t say which model). They needed that for its ability to run nearly silently, so sound engineers could capture dialogue and foley engineers could add a V8 growl later.
One of the four lacked that heavy bumper. It wore a fake fiberglass bumper instead. Why? To lighten it so filmmakers could use it to film jumps. That model also had added suspension travel to absorb the shock of the landings.
In profile, as seen by a strange penguin-man
The last of the bunch sounds the silliest but is a common Hollywood trick. It’s a double-decker Batmobile with a second driving position on the roof. A stuntman drove the car from up there while star Pattinson acted out the chase scene from the dummy driving position below, allowing closeups on the actor as the car did real – not CGI – stunts.
One Homage to the Campy Old Days
Though the new Batmobile lacks the defense-contractor-fit-and-finish of the cars the World’s Greatest Detective has driven in other films, it does take one cue from Dark Knight history. On startup, red LED lights in the front appear, mimicking the red stripes of the first on-screen Batman – Adam West’s 1960s televised take on the character.
