Stop fronting: You know perfectly well you want to ditch your car AND your bike and ride around town in a 10-foot, two-ton, six-legged robot. And if you donate to Project Hexapod, the creators of this behemoth (whose name is Stompy), you can get your wish. Just $300 gets you a ride around town in a giant mechanical insect. For $1,000, you can drive it.

The Project Hexapod roboticists, who have completed designs for a leg and 80 percent of the chassis, say they can build a bare-bones Stompy for $65,000. But if their Kickstarter is really successful, they’ll tack on bonuses like an animatronic head, a sound system, and potentially “flame effects.” And if you don’t have $300, but the idea of a flamethrowing rideable robot spider is too good to pass up, they’ve got pretty sweet incentives at the lower levels too: For $200 Stompy will stomp an item of your choice (voodoo doll of your ex! Voodoo doll of your ex!), or for smaller amounts they’ve got sweet T-shirts and bumper stickers.

You want this sticker.

To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How

And if that’s not incentive enough, do it for the vision of a futuristic city where “public transit” means “impossibly huge walking robot.”