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Big Bad Boy
Vehicle of the Week
Dan Lienert - Forbes.com

Homeland Defense Vehicles' Bad Boy Heavy Muscle Truck is a converted military vehicle that can protect its occupants from dirty bombs and chemical and biological agents. If it looks and sounds a bit to you like a joke, that's understandable.
For one thing, you might have started laughing when you saw the photo. For another, the truck just seems too ridiculous to be real. According to a recent statement from the manufacturer, the vehicle's prices can reach $750,000 when the truck is equipped with the full nuclear, chemical and biological detection and protection package (good if there are a lot of terrorists in your area). A company spokesperson said in a recent e-mail message that the vehicle would have its introduction at a monthly meeting of the Dallas Safari Club, which also doesn't sound like a real thing (but it is: see: www.biggame.org).
The Bad Boy Heavy Muscle Truck is, according to the company, a "luxury version" of Texas-based Stewart & Stevenson's Medium Tactical Vehicle, which the U.S. Army uses. This kind of super truck is becoming popular with wealthy civilians, who see the machine as a ludicrous alternative to a sport utility vehicle or extended cab or super-duty pickup.
The Bad Boy weighs approximately 13,000 pounds and has 330 horsepower. It is 21 feet long, ten feet tall and eight feet wide, and seats three adults. The passenger compartment is located over the engine. The truck has all-wheel drive and can run at freeway speeds as well as carry a 5,000-lb. payload.
Like General Motors' (nyse: GM - news - people ) Hummer H1, another civilianized military vehicle, the Bad Boy is prepared for extremely challenging off-road driving. It has 22 inches of ground clearance and can climb grades as steep as 60% with a full payload. It can operate in up to five feet of water. Its 58-gallon diesel tank can be good for over 400 miles on one fill-up.
Attacking a small country? The Bad Boy may be the vehicle for you.
A cabin filtration system is optional. This unit over-pressurizes the passenger compartment with clean air in the presence of nuclear fallout, biological contaminants and/or chemical agents.
Forbes Fact
Homeland Defense Vehicles hopes to sell 50 Bad Boys in 2005. The conversion to civilian vehicle from the military original is complex and typically takes six weeks to complete. The range of options to customize the vehicle, according to the company, is almost limitless--like that of a Bentley. A crazy Bentley that can storm Baghdad.

You've gotta read this article! "Kiss My Megatruck, Dude
When the world is in perfect, ultra-macho harmony, you get a 9-foot-tall, 14,500-pound SUV" by Mark Morford in SF Gate.

Aww, screw it. I mean, really. You just gotta love this thing.
You just gotta love the fact that some semitruck company somewhere called International Truck and Engine Corp. is now coming out with what they claim is the world's largest production pickup, called the CXT, all 9 feet high and 8 feet wide, a whopping 21 feet long and 14,500 pounds and 18 million excruciating earthly groans of it.

And in most states that don't give a crap for their roads or the environment or any human life that might be existing in the various passenger cars surrounding it, you don't need a commercial truck license to own or drive the CXT, a vehicle that makes the Hummer H2 look like a Honda Civic and that makes all the manly thick-necked boys go, ooohhhyeessss, and that the company itself claims, oh so tellingly, will absolutely guarantee your title of "king of the dirt pile."

See, there is this point. There is this point where it all becomes just beyond silly and absurd and surreal. There is this threshold you reach where you finally just have to toss in the moral and spiritual and intellectual and commonsensical towel and just laugh out loud and shake your head and sigh and then run off to the woods with a bottle of fine sake and the collected Coltrane. This is what you have to do. Especially when faced with such wicked absurdities as, say, Kraft Lunchables. Or John Ashcroft. Or Dr. Phil. Or the CXT.

And, for a brief, shining moment, I had thought the cute little Hummer H2 had this particular point of macho absurdity nailed -- defined it, owned it, sneered at it and ran over it 200 times with its big crushing 22-inch monster rims and said ha ha ha, I am the one, beeyatch, no vehicle is sillier and no vehicle is more moronic and no vehicle is more perfectly representative of the aggro-macho-gluttonous attitude of America and no vehicle better symbolizes our childish and cartoonish and ultimately sad stance toward how we treat the planet and how we view ourselves and our role in the world.

Not anymore. The CXT makes the Hummer whimper and cower and suck its thumb. The CXT is by far the biggest baddest dumbest production pickup in American history, and no one is even trying to debate that fact, no one even coming anywhere near defending the thing as anything other than every monosyllabic frat boy's wettest of wet automotive dreams because even the most die-hard knobby-brained SUV fanatic takes one look at the CXT and goes, holy crap, that thing is sort of, you know, ridiculous. But in a really badass sort of way.

Oh sure, the company says the CXT is a "severe" truck for "professional" use. Oh sure, they say it will be sold mostly to hardcore contractors and landscapers and boat racers and people with massive amounts of nonarable acreage that needs to have 200,000 pounds of rocks hauled across it on a daily basis. It doesn't matter.

Because this ain't simply a work truck. It's also designed for the "discriminating" blue-collar redneck with $115,000 to spare, given how you can order the CXT with every imaginable luxury; there's even a "customized black International CXT with ghosted green flames that has a leather interior with wood-grain trim, reclining captain chairs, a fold-down bench that can be used as a bed, an overhead compartment with drop-down DVD, an XM satellite premium radio system and a rear-mounted camera." I mean, how cool is that? Answer: totally mega manly cool. Dude.

After all, this is the BushCo era, baby. This country is all about excess and earthly abuse and Texas-sized faux machismo masquerading as true patriotism. Why even try to hide your gluttony anymore? Be proud of it, says the GOP -- er, the CXT. Get yourself a monster truck and ride around in towering titanic style and protect the crumbling lie of what makes America strong, because it sure as hell ain't our amazing religious diversity and it ain't affirmative action or intelligent diplomacy or deep respect for our allies and it sure as hell ain't same-sex marriage or feminine energy or spiritual openness or pathetic little hybrid cars, you liberal twit.

It's Rambo, baby. It's 7 miles per gallon of diesel, downhill. It's monster pickup trucks the size of a large studio apartment.

So then. Let's do it. Let's just get it over with. Let's all get a CXT. I mean, what the hell, right? Let's just give in and stomp around like we own the goddamn place and burn up all the remaining oil a fast as possible, maul the roads and gag the air and wipe out all those silly Priuses and Mini Coopers and all those annoying gnatlike bicycles once and for all.

It will just be, after all, so much fun, until the hurricanes strike and the earthquakes rumble and the exhausted Earth finally shudders and recoils and opens up wide and swallows us whole.

But you'll be OK. You'll be safely ensconced in your CXT, loving the fact that in Hell, it's all "off road."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/09/22/notes092204.DTL&nl=fix