What do you get if you take an ultra-compact quadricycle designed for city use and reinvent it as a wild off-road beast? Funny you should ask: check out the new Opel Rocks-e e-xtreme.
The design is the winning entry in a Rocks-e Design Hack contest for students to create their own design of the German brand’s city car – and will now be made for real as a special one-off design.
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Now, in case you were wondering: yes, the Opel Rocks-e does look suspiciously like a Citroën Ami. It’s a rebadged and lightly reworked Ami that is offered in Opel’s home market of Germany, where fellow Stellantis company Citroën isn’t so popular.
Back to the Rocks-e e-xtreme. The winning entry in the Design Hack contest was chosen by a panel led by Opel boss Florian Huettl and design chief Mark Adams, and was submitted by Lukas Wenzhöfer. The 26-year-old industrial design student at the University of Design in Pforzheim/Baden-Württemberg said he wanted to take the “unfiltered driving experience” of the Rocks-e “to the extreme” by adding off-roading capability.
So the Rocks e-xtreme gains a widened tracks thanks to off-road tyres that stick out from the machine, with double wishbone suspension fitted to the strong. There’s also a roll bat fitted to the top of the quadricycle to aid safety in the event of an off-road accident. And attached to that is a large rear wing to add downforce, although given that the powertrain is unchanged giving the Rocks-e a top speed of 28mph we’re not convinced it will be that effective.
While Opel has shown off the Rocks-e e-xtreme in a series of renderings, it will not build the machine as a one-off for real, with a promise to showcase the full build process on its various social media channels.
This is not the first time that the Rocks-e/Ami quadricycle has been given an off-road makeover: Citroën previously released a My Ami Buggy concept, which actually led to a limited production run – albeit purely as a trim option and without any extra off-road capability added.
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