Dodge Ram SRT-10

The Ophidiary was initially minded to file this under Apocrypha. A truck is not a snake. A truck is the opposite of a snake: high, blunt, four-square, and entirely without the ability to disappear into vegetation.

Then it drove one, metaphorically, and reconsidered.

The Ram SRT-10 took the 8.3-litre Viper V10, five hundred horsepower, and installed it in a vehicle with a live rear axle and a cargo bed. It went on to set a Guinness record as the world’s fastest production pickup at just over 154 miles per hour — a figure that means very little except as evidence of how badly someone wanted it.

What earns it canonical status is not the speed. It is the honesty of the gesture. Every other manufacturer that has ever put a performance engine in a truck has invented a new name for the result: Lightning, Raptor, TRX, Syclone. Dodge simply moved the snake across and let the truck carry it. It is the only vehicle in this book whose serpent is explicitly a transplant, and it never once pretended otherwise.

There is precedent in nature. Some of the largest constrictors spend a great deal of their lives simply carrying enormous mass slowly from one place to another, and the fact that they are not fast does not make them less snake.