A person’s first car is a very special thing. Most of us drove junkers of some degree of close-to-falling-apart-ness, but the best bad car has to be Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder.
As part of the ongoing, never-ending, hysteria over the new Star Wars movie, Jason Torchinsky over at Jalopnik decided to take a closer took at the landspeeder and figure out what makes it tick. Or zoom. Whatever it does.
Thanks to Wookiepedia, we know that the landspeeder was a SoroSuub X-34 and that Sorosuub is “a massive Sullustan corporation” that had its intergalactic tentacles in a variety of industries, ranging from “energy mining to food packaging.”
“So, based on their considerably diversified products, I’d say they most resembled Hyundai here on Earth, since Hyundai makes cars, cargo ships, owns apartment buildings, and probably sells seafood or something,” he notes. The landspeeder probably sold for about 2,400 credits, or 10,550 credits new, with Skywalker selling it at a loss of 400 credits when he sold it, “which he blamed on the newer X-38s coming out.”
He goes on to argue that a landspeeder is probably more efficient than a wheeled vehicle that is more like a hovercraft, what with being a “repulsorlift-magic vehicle” and all. “If you live in a massive, multi-planet society, it may make more sense to have vehicles that can handle almost any terrain rather than having to build massive roadway infrastructures on every planet. We just did it to our one planet, and it was a shitload of work, and it’s still nowhere near done, really. So I get it now.”
Torchinsky goes on to compare the landspeeders’ specs, how to drive it, what kind of fuel it uses and why, perplexingly, it doesn’t seem to have lights. Read all about it here.
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