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.

Grist State of Emergency | A limited-run newsletter from Grist, exploring the ways climate disasters are reshaping elections. Delivered every Tuesday until Election Day.

Reader support helps sustain our work. Donate today to keep our climate news free.

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.”