Dodge Sidewinder Concept

The sidewinder is a rattlesnake that has abandoned forward motion. On loose desert sand, pushing backwards achieves nothing, so it throws its body sideways in a series of J-shaped loops, touching the ground at only two points at a time, leaving a track of parallel bars behind it like a barcode. It is one of the very few animals whose locomotion had to be filmed in slow motion before anyone could explain it.

The name is therefore not about aggression. It is about traction — about an animal redesigning its entire relationship with the ground because the ground refused to cooperate.

Whether the Dodge concept truck of 1997 was thinking that hard is doubtful. It was a Dakota-based show vehicle with the 8.0-litre Viper V10 dropped into it, produced during Chrysler’s spectacular late-nineties habit of putting the V10 into anything with a floor. But the name landed better than anyone intended. A performance pickup is exactly a vehicle attempting to reconcile enormous power with a surface that does not want it.

The AIM-9 Sidewinder missile shares the etymology and, unusually, the reasoning: it was named for the snake because it homes on heat, and pit vipers — the sidewinder among them — detect infrared through the pit organs between eye and nostril. Of all the animals whose names have been borrowed by machines, the sidewinder is one of the very few where the borrowing is technically accurate.

The concept never reached production. Its idea did, in 2004, under a different name. This is how it usually goes: the snake gets there first and something else takes the credit.