With the nation’s seemingly insatiable hunger for zombie-themed entertainment still in full swing, Hyundai is leaving nothing to chance and showing off a second vehicle specifically prepped in tribute to Robert Kirkman’s long-running series of Walking Dead graphic novels and comics. Debuting at this year’s Comic-Con event in San Diego, the Veloster Zombie Survival Machine (henceforth to be referred to as ZSM) joins last year’s Hyundai Elantra coupe ZSM in the tiny-but-growing segment of vehicles equipped to neutralize the walking dead.
Locked, loaded, and prepared to macerate the inanimate and bloated, the Veloster rocks a pair of bumper-mounted chainsaws that can be quickly swapped out for a more traditional zombie-clearing horde plow when the need arises. If conventional firepower is more your style, switch on the floodlights, sound the aptly named “Doom Whistle,” and grab a hold of the roof mounted, quick-change .50 cal machine gun/flamethrower setup and make it rain a little terror. For good measure, additional gunnery includes hood- and door-mounted machine guns. The windows receive protective shielding made of barbed wire and wrought iron, and a pair of hood-mounted sandbags catch errant shrapnel. Mounted to the rear you’ll find an old-school baseball bat decorated with spikes, a samurai sword, an armored bumper with protruding knife blades, and an exposed spare wheel and tire that’s sure to be shredded by the first zombie that gets his lifeless, un-manicured paws on it.
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Why exactly it’s finished in Vitamin C Orange textured paint we can’t say, but it does look sharp. Forged wheels wearing all-terrain tires hide beneath oversized wheel flares, and a sprayed-on textured coating covers the floor. As you might expect, the interior contains all the controls to operate the defense systems and plenty of storage for ammo, weapons, first-aid items, and the like.
As it sits, the 2013 Veloster ZSM resembles the production 2013 Veloster in pretty much name only, and neither Hyundai nor Glapin Auto Sports, who performed much of the transformation, have divulged powertrain details. But any sensible zombie slayer would want the Turbo, right? As much as we enjoy these one-off projects, it appears the only thing capable of stopping an inevitable zombie apocalypse at this point is a wane in the the public’s interest.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Car & Driver