[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YxOdvM5lY]
Our vehicle interiors are like shrines to our lives: corroding pennies, the odd Cheeto, the AWOL cylinder of ChapStick, crumbs from a convenience store “delicacy,” the errant lump of gum (thanks kids!), Goldfish cracker bits, silvery gum wrappers, little lakes of gravel — and if you live north of Mason-Dixon, quartz-like nuggets of ice-dissolving road salt. There may not be an app for any of that, but at least there’s now officially a vacuum!
Meet Honda’s 2014 Odyssey, which comes with — wait for it — the world’s first built-into-a-vehicle, crud-sucking hose. Really, a vacuum cleaner spliced with a van, complete with attachments, a replaceable filter, a canister bag and a stretchable hose that reaches from back to front. Honda apparently ran its new minivan and a ShopVac through one of those pods Jeff Goldblum used in The Fly.
You access the thing by pulling a panel off the sidewall of the rear interior. According to WTVR, the vacuum will work continuously while the engine’s running or give you eight minutes of charge with the engine off (which, all things considered, doesn’t sound half-bad when you consider how little time your average money-gobbling wash-station hoover yields).
What do you call it? Well a “HondaVac,” of course.
The only downside: It doesn’t come cheap. Honda only plans to sell it with the Touring Elite version of the minivan, which should be available this summer. Then again, it’s a vacuum — in your car! Short of this thing flipping out jet engines like the DeLorean in Back to the Future and fueling off just the sort of garbage you’ll be sucking up with the HondaVac, how do you beat that?