Swiss tuner and automotive futurist Rinspeed will take one of the weirdest concepts we’ve seen in recent times to January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The headline is this: the Rinspeed Oasis comes with a garden.

The full-autonomous EV is a two-seater city car with an exterior that apparently looks “like a trendy buddy of Star Wars icon R2D2.” That’s what Rinspeed says anyway, don’t blame us. Inside the company claims it has the ambience of a family room, which sounds more reasonable.

Rinspeed used to tune Porsches

Madcap tuner Mansory bought the Porsche tuning arm of Rinspeed in 2007. Since then, the Swiss company has become increasingly detached from reality and now concentrates solely on madcap cars that occasionally throw up a cool innovation.

The owner, Frank M Rinderknecht, freely admits he’s not quite with us on planet Earth and yet some of his cars are actually quite endearing. Last year he took a BMW i8 with a pet drone to CES, but this year’s car looks more interesting.

It has some useful things

The windscreen is probably the most intriguing and potentially useful application on this car, as it supports virtual reality and augmented reality. That could actually be really cool for the city streets in a car that has taken the driving duties off you. You could play games, do the shopping and pick it up on the way home or just take a guided tour of a new area.

There’s a temperature-controlled drawer in the back of the car that could be great for a pizza delivery company and you can reconfigure the car with multiple seats or a single armchair and a TV. Or you could leave it all alone and tend the small garden beneath the windscreen that Rinderknecht claims is ideal for radishes or flowers.

We just don’t know what to make of that part. It might be absolutely nuts, in fact that’s the way we’re going. But still, it’s fun to look at the cars that might be coming soon and to rethink what we’re going to do with our time when the tiresome task of driving just isn’t a thing anymore.

 

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