Warner Brothers has shared a video telling the story of the Batmobile prototype built for the latest Batman movie starring Robert Pattinson. As it turns out, famous graphic designer Ash Thorp came up with multiple sketches of the car, and the one that ended up on the filming set was fully electric despite a bulging ‘motor dome’.
Compared to its predecessors, the most recent Batmobile looks less like something out of a kid’s power fantasy and more like an actual car. It was designed specifically with this new image and the new story in mind. It had to look like something that Bruce Wayne could realistically cobble together on his own. Since the story involves the car smashing through buildings, it was conceived with the engine at the rear end. Then the team working on it found that a motor would serve it better than the engine.
The project necessitated around 2,000 custom-fabricated parts. Most Batmobile concepts used in the movie were powered by a 700-horsepower V8 engine concealed at the front end of the car and connected to all four wheels. One example was built specifically for the wall-ramming scene, another one was stripped down to the bone for stunts, and another one yet was built for filming scenes inside the car – that one was driven by a stunt driver sitting on the roof.