No 'Bat' In The New Batmobile: The Politics Of A Redesign

Holy Batman, it's a tank!

The newly designed vehicle for the film Batman Begins, the fourth installment in the saga of the Caped Crusader, is a vehicle that is bigger and badder than all the Batmobiles of years gone by.


Making its debut as the new Batmobile, the Tumbler is a war tank with jumping capability of over 6 feet.

The Tumbler, as it is appropriately named, is a mutation, a Frankenstein of automobiles— it is a cross between a Humvee and a military assault tank— a sports utility tank if you will. A combination of a V8 engine and a jet engine, the new Batmobile is capable of jumping six feet high, but what good is all of this if the vehicle no longer resembles any of its predecessors in its bat-like features?

"We lost Batman," says George Barris, customizer of thousands of vehicles and the man behind the 1966 television show's Batmobile. "The [movie] car is terrible,” he says. “It becomes more like a tank, [with] big ugly wheels on it…all kinds of things were sticking out… Do you want Batman to drive a war tank?"

Barris' creation is arguably the most recognizable Batmobile to date. He recalls working on the design for the superhero vehicle using some of the elements that the comic book Batman creator had originally envisioned.

"Bob Kane took a bat face and cut it out and put it on the face of the car, and so I said… I'm gonna incorporate it into the car's construction. The headlights became the ears, the hood scoop became the nose... [and] the mouth was the grill," Barris explains.

But this new vehicle is so unlike any of its preceding Batmobiles that it has the customizer of such famous screen legends as the DeLorean time-traveler in Back to the Future, K.I.T.T. of Knight Rider and General Lee of The Dukes of Hazzard, confounded. "They had another Batmobile, the fins were a little higher… Still a Batmobile that was like a bat," Barris recalls of the vehicle that Val Kilmer drove in Batman Forever.

He believes that given the current political climate in Iraq, films should be more about entertainment and that the redesign of the Batmobile reflects what he sees as a current trend toward realism replacing good old-fashioned fun and fantasy. "Batman shouldn't be military… I guess I just don't like to see a war vehicle."

Despite the Tumbler's design being a huge departure from the original bat concept, Barris is quick to point out that the vehicle itself is an engineering feat. The movie car reportedly can jump 4 to 6 feet vertically and up to 60 feet horizontally.

The new Batmobile is the creation of director Christopher Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley, who built the car from scratch. Crowley envisioned a vehicle that handled like a Lamborghini but was as potent as a tank. The result of their experiment became the Tumbler, a military transport vehicle powerful enough to roll through the roughest terrains.

It comes equipped with six monster truck tires and has a 5.7-liter, 350-cubic-inch, 340-horsepower engine that accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in less than five seconds. It stands 15 feet long and weighs in at 2.5 tons.

Nolan's team of special effects artists, lead by supervisor Andrew Smith, built eight models in all for the film's production. The powerful Batmobile was able to leap and corner at unfathomable speeds, crushing all enemy cars in its path. Smith and his team spent days testing out the vehicle for the various chase sequences involved in the film.

At one point, 30 stunt drivers were used to create the spectacular chase involving the Batmobile going berserk on the roads of Gotham City.

"The whole body of the Batmobile rolls and flexes from side to side," says George Cottle, the stunt driver operating the car during its chase scenes.

Still, with all its fancy maneuvering, does the Tumbler really deserve to wear the name of Batmobile?  Yes, says Bill Spencer, a scale-model builder and creator of The History of the Batmobile site. "In the sense that Batmobiles have always reflected the aesthetic of the time… In this case, it combines the tough, rugged design of popular SUVs with the angular designs associated with stealth technology."


Photo courtesy of batmobilehistory.com