Just What We Needed

"New Bad Boy Truck Dwarfs the Hummer" reports a wire service account today.

"It's the rugged Bubba," said Daniel Ayres, president and CEO of Homeland Defense Vehicles LLC and its division Bad Boy Trucks.

...For a base price of $225,000 -- nearly twice the Hummer H1 wagon's base price of $117,508 -- consumers can get a basic version of the 10-foot-tall Bad Boy that can drive through five feet of water, climb a 60-degree grade, tow six tons and keep rolling even with a quarter-sized hole in the tire's sidewall.

The price goes up from there, depending on options. Drivers can get infrared cameras that peer through darkness. The flat-nosed cab can be bulletproof, and house a mini-safe behind three leather seats. The dash can include a satellite phone, a two-way radio and a global-positioning system -- all alongside DVD, MP3 and CD players and a flip-out LCD screen.

For $750,000, buyers can get the fully loaded "NBC" version that can, Ayres said, detect and block out fallout from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons by over-pressurizing the cab with filtered, clean air much like an aircraft.

Ayres said he isn't playing on post-Sept. 11 fears by offering the NBC option.

"There's a certain group of people who color outside the box," Ayres said, and if they want to escape a city targeted by terrorists with dirty bombs or biological agents, "this is the truck for them."

Nope, no playing on fears here, and I doubt that Ayers finds it distasteful to offer such a vehicle at a time when American men and women and untold numbers of Iraqis are being killed and maimed in a war fought to secure supplies of foreign oil either. Perhaps he even sees the Bad Boy as a way to honor their sacrifice, protecting America's right to drive huge swollen symbols of outsized manhood over hill and dale and whatever else we we feel like trampling on.

You can see the truck here.

And it will probably come as no surprise that Homeland Defense Vehicles is based in Texas.