The Dacia DUSTAR went to space

Dacia has had a good race lately with Cheap EV and simple but smart features in his cars. Today, it seems that the Romanian manufacturer is still having a good time, as its April fools joke is actually funny. Dacia sent a Immerse yourself in space.

Well it’s a toy Duster, but that’s the punchline! The rest of the prank involved a balloon, a fake launch video, and a really bad pun. At first I swore this prank showed a car against a green screen.

I must have rolled my eyes and moaned loudly at the cheap stuffing and DUSTAR pun, but Dacia actually made an effort, as seen in this behind-the-scenes video:

Unlike the grandiose and ultimately stupid parody that Volkswagen fired – which, by the way, has now resulted in its own fiasco – Dacia was perfectly happy with a small-scale science project prank. In other words, Dacia has just had a good time.

The automaker tied up a balloon full of hydrogen to a toy model of his Duster. He rigged this on what looks like a 3D printed platform, meaning we can now add vehicular space travel to the long list of uses for additive manufacturing. He then set it all up on a sturdy camera system with selfie sticks and let it rip.

The DUSTAR platform had a GPS on board, which Dacia used to track the launch, trajectory and eventual reentry of its small car. The project was undertaken in Sheffield, a town in South Yorkshire, England. Looks like this was the launch site. Dacia gave us a glimpse into the trajectory of the DUSTAR, which at one point was hovering over Clay Cross in Derbyshire, England.

The distance between these two locations is about 18 miles, and if that’s where the DUSTAR landed, it hasn’t traveled too far. Still, he did manage to get into space, so I call it a win anyway.

All of the Dacia prank is building on the company’s ethics for its money and it wanted to show that something like this can be done for less. Yes, technically it did send a car into space. Except, rather than a roadster and a rocket, it was just a toy and a ball.