When you think of the future of transportation, you probably don’t think of water dragons like those in director James Cameron’s newest Avatar movie, Avatar: The Way of Water, which will be released on December 16. You might think of something more along the lines of the Mercedes-AVTR, which Mercedes debuted just before the pandemic at CES in 2020.

The collaboration between the producers and directors of the newest Avatar movie and the automobile company may seem like an unlikely one—after all, there are no cars in the movie, and the Vision AVTR does not appear on-screen. Yet, after spending an afternoon driving this out-of-this-world concept and getting a behind-the-scenes look at the new movie, it makes pretty good sense.

“Avatar as a movie as an IP across all the things we do, has something that a lot of movies don’t have, which is an ethos,” Jon Landau, COO of Lightstorm Entertainment and Academy Award-winning producer of Avatar, said via video conference at the event we attended in Manhattan Beach, California.

Read the rest of my story at Ars Technica.

You can also see video of me actually driving it on Instagram, too.