If you're an environmentally conscious freelancer who loves to travel, rejoice! Nissan just crammed a personal office into the back of an electric van.
There are all the basic necessities—chair, desk, Wi-Fi, charging station for your phone—plus some nifty perks, like a Bluetooth speaker, a mini fridge and an espresso machine that rises mechanically out of the counter like some miracle altar to the gods.
Design firm Studio Hardie of Lewes, England, created the van, which is a souped-up version of Nissan's E-NV200 model. It also includes a lighting system controlled via app, a glass roof and a folding bicycle hitched to the inside of the back door, so you can break away with a secondary means of transportation. Most bizarre, though, is the wooden platform that slides out of the van's rear floor. Nissan bills it as a "deck" for relaxing. A more likely use seems as a plank for unloading mutinous interns.
The concept feels in some ways like a more utilitarian, prosaic, real-life version of German hardware store Hornbach's delightful 2010 ad "The Infinite House," about a man who turns a tiny shack into an impossibly warm, continuously unfolding home. In a more current (and again, realistic) comparison, it also calls to mind some of the features—like a mini-bar similarly hidden in a windowsill—that come with an Emirates airline first-class seat, perhaps more accurately described as a flying hotel room, which Casey Neistat deftly captured on camera recently.
The Nissan van's zero-emissions footprint, though, is a unique—and key—selling point. And before you point to the difficulty of refueling as grounds to dismiss the idea as fanciful, it's important to note that the automaker expects the number of electric vehicle charge points in the U.K. to surpass the number of gas stations in the country by 2020.
Whether anyone actually wants to spend that much time packed like a sardine into a very fancy tin can is a different question. Then again, it's still nicer than most cubicles, if you don't mind posting up wherever you can find parking.
More pics below. Via My Modern Met and Design Taxi.
