Hannover, 17 November 2010. It looks almost like a scorpion on wheels: The Scorpions-Amarok, which Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles has constructed for musician Rudolf Schenker is a real head-turner. Plenty of airbrush, an automatically extendible spike at the rear, and more than 120 LED’s make this pickup a real rocker mobile. The way-out wagon came into being from an idea by the band’s founder Rudolf Schenker.

“Our first reaction was that someone had gone off their rocker when they told us we were supposed to convert an Amarok into a scorpion”, says Dirk Seifried, Head of the technical Tools Manufacturing Service at Volkswagen in Braunschweig.
The idea wasn’t someone going off their rocker after all, but actually one of the famous mad bad ideas from real rocker Rudolf Schenker.

During the Dakar Rally in Chile at the beginning of the year, and at the Amarok press presentation in the Argentinean city of Bariloche which followed, the artist and the members of his band got to know the new pickup from Volkswagen.

One day Schenker had one of his weird fantasies.
“It must be possible to build an Amarok like a scorpion, with a spiky tail at the back that can be folded up and down“.
Thomas Ammon, the person responsible for press and VIP vehicles in the Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles Development Department, didn’t take long to make his mind up: Inspired and enthusiastic about the idea, he simply went straight to work. He brought on board former prototype developer Dirk Seifried, and Jörg Drexler, Volkswagen Brand executive responsible for special projects, and started going boldly where no-one had gone before, with the secret project codenamed “Scorpions-Amarok“.

The vehicle is a Volkswagen Amarok Highline in “Reflex Silver Metallic” with a 2.0-liter TDI engine and 163 H.P. The new Volkswagen pickup only consumes 7.6 liters of fuel per 100 kilometres, making it the most economical in its class.

The Volkswagen experts went to work with a will, doing without holidays, staying on after work, totally engrossed in turning Rudolf Schenker’s vision into a reality, creating it in-house, and guaranteeing for it the full tried and trusted Volkswagen quality.
It rapidly became clear that the body of the scorpion could best be sprayed on by airbrush, and so Ammon and his team took the Amarok to the city of Cottbus, to the specialists at “Niedergesäß”, where expert painters spent three weeks restyling the pickup.

At the same time, the team set about developing the highly delicate and detailed work of preparing the scorpion’s tail and the motor to operate it, and all the time keeping the Amarok under wraps, to make sure the great surprise stayed exactly that.

Rudolf Schenker and his band are excited about their new car.
“This is the coolest motor I’ve ever seen, by a long, long way. It’s pure Rock`n`Roll on four wheels“, raved Schenker.
During the shooting session with Hannover star photographer Nikolaj Georgiew on the Kalisalz-Berg, Potash Hill, in Wunstorf-Bokeloh, the guitarist posed with his Flying-Y guitar, and his life partner, model Tanya Sazonova, also fell in love at first sight with the Scorpions-Amarok.





Text & Image Source: Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles