Animal-Vehicle Hybrid

Does it purr like a cat, or like an engine?

A living creature who looks and acts like an animal (sentient or otherwise), except it has distinctive vehicle components, like windows and doors, or wheels, or luggage storage areas. It's best not to think about where its internal organs are.

Related to Sentient Vehicle, which deals with other living vehicles, and Mix-and-Match Critters, which deals with mixing animals with other animals, rather than vehicles.

Not to be confused with ordinary animals being used as vehicles, no matter how outlandish. See Mechanical Horse for animals made of mechanical parts, Automaton Horses for animals that might as well be made of mechanical parts, and My Horse Is a Motorbike for vehicles being used in roles traditionally allocated to animals. They may or may not be part of Organic Technology or a Robeast.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Super Beast Machine God Dancouga, the weapons of the Cyber Beast Force can transform between beast, vehicle, and humanoid modes, and are programmed with the instincts of the animals they resemble. A sufficiently wild-hearted pilot can bond with their Cyber Beast on a spiritual level, granting it ferocious power. Later in the series, this allows all four Beasts to combine into the Super Robot Dancouga.
  "From the cries of beasts, from the cries of man! The time has come for a god to be born!"
• Digimon Adventure: (2020) introduces Komondomon to the franchise's large roster of Digimon. It's a big, friendly komondor-breed dog mixed with a troop transport vehicle, and the Chosen Children use one as a means of getting around the Digital World quicker.
• My Neighbor Totoro has the appropriately named Catbus, which acts as teleportation for the Totoros and you can ride much like a normal bus. The short form sequel, Mei and the Kittenbus, reveals that there are multiple types of catbuses, including the titular mini-sized Kittenbus, a long Cattrain, and an enormous elderly Catliner (cruise ship).
• Pui Pui Molcar features Molcars, which are guinea pig/car hybrids. They act pretty much like regular guinea pigs, but they have wheels instead of feet and a shallow interior that people can come in and out of to drive them. According to the eleventh episode, these creatures somehow evolved from an even larger species of guinea pigs as we know them.
• In One Piece Film: Strong World Franky, modifies a giant grasshopper and crayfish into living motorcycles.

Eastern Animation

• Tickety Toc has Pufferty, which is a train/dog hybrid.

Fan Works

• Kris Performs Surgery: Rexum, the leader of the Hershey's Angels, has the upper body of a bull and the lower body of a motorbike.
• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom created the OC Wheely Bopper, a pegasus with wheels for legs. She's known to communicate by honking, and she bathes at the car wash.

Films — Animation

• BIONICLE: The Legend Reborn: The Skopio was a giant scorpion that the Great Beings tampered with and gave it Spider Tank qualities like tank treads and a cannon for a tail.
• All of the animals in the Cars franchise resemble vehicles with animal-like body parts: For example, insects resemble tiny VW Beetles with insect wings and antennae, birds are small airplanes, and tractors resemble and act like cows.

Films — Live-Action

• The 2010 B-Movie Super Hybrid involves an unusual species of man-eating Giant Squid that had evolved to transform into perfect (with headlights and everything) look-alikes of automobiles in order to lure people inside them and eat them... or run people over if they are a threat.

Literature

• The Animorphs novel The Andalite Chronicles features a bird-like creature called a Mortron, which can detach its head from its torso in battle and attack with both. Its bottom half has wheels at the end of each of its limbs. The biological impossibility of the wheels gets lampshaded, which doesn’t stop them from rolling.
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: Members of the Supernatural Elite have highbeasts, which are basically magical statues that can be given the form of a horse or another ridable animal of the user's choice with wings and are used like a magic-powered Automaton Horse. When the protagonist with Past-Life Memories from modern-day Earth gets hers, she gets inspired by My Neighbor Totoro and makes it into a hybrid between a car and a red panda. The only reason it's not a cat is that her mentor forbade her from making the animal part into something similar to her family's feline sigil because it just looks silly to him. Perks of the form include a roof over her head and a windshield in bad weather, a one-person form just small enough that she can use it in larger hallways instead of walking and being able to make it accommodate as many people as she wants, versus the three-person maximum capacity of classic highbeasts.
• Clifford Simak's The Goblin Reservation has an alien species that uses biological wheels.
• In the Discworld, the God of Evolution spends his time tinkering with the natural world in order to innovate and improve pre-existing designs. The Wizards of Unseen University are consternated to see one of his improvements to the common elephant involves putting it on wheels, as these would be so much more efficient for such a massive animal than legs. Life is a learning curve for even a God: he soon realises a prerequisite for a wheeled elephant would be a completely flat smooth Veldt with no inconvenient rocky bits with sharp edges, and that ain't going to happen yet. The God gloomily concedes that the design needs stronger wheels with thicker tyres and some sort of puncture repair kit.
• Graeme Base's Truck Dogs features dogs with vehicle body parts.
• In the His Dark Materials book The Amber Spyglass, there's a quadrupedal, diamond-shaped species called the Mulefa, who move by way of disc-shaped seed pods from the giant seed-pod trees that inhabit the planet, which they fit on to bony axles on their front and rear legs, using the two middle limbs to propel themselves. They’re like biological motorcycles.
• Ozma of Oz has the Wheelers, quadrupedal humanoids that have round wheels instead of hands and feet at the ends of their limbs.
• In the Uplift series there's a wheeled species called the g'Kek, who are described at one point as looking like "a squid in a wheelchair".
• Xanth has a car/harpy hybrid.

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • The surprise twist in the pilot episode is that Farpoint Station is actually a giant space jellyfish that has internal rooms that humanoids can live in. In essence, an animal-space station hybrid. They're brought back in the Star Trek: Titan novels as animal/spaceship hybrids (though the race using them as such originally only used dead ones).
  • The episode "Tin Man" had a telepathic creature called Gomtuu that was both a sentient organic being and a ship. It became suicidal after its crew died.
• Super Sentai:
  • Ninja Sentai Kakuranger: The Kakuranger travel around Japan in a sentient hybrid of a cat and a food truck named Nekomaru from which they serve crepes to make money when they aren't fighting Yokai. Nekomaru is armed with a turret and is capable of biting and flying but rarely ever fights.
  • Engine Sentai Go-onger has The Engines; giant, sentient animal/vehicle hybrid creatures from the Engine World. They serve as the partners of the Go-Ongers, and make up the parts of the teams Humongous Mecha. Downplayed in GoOnger's American adaptation Power Rangers RPM, since here the Engines counterparts are not sentient; just machines that only resemble a cross between an animal and a vehicle.

Tabletop Games

• In the backstory of the railroad building game Iron Dragon, captured dragons are magically transformed into cybernetic dragon locomotives.

Toys

• The Fisher-Price toyline known as "Car-nivores" was based on this, with car/animal hybrids where the animal parts would surface if a switch was flipped on the car. The commercials emphasized the animalistic half.
• Several Hot Wheels series have cars or other vehicles that are half-animal. For example, the Attack Pack series consists of vehicles that are also wild animals (such as trucks resembling wild cats, planes resembling birds, etc.).
• The Shopkins toyline has Cutie Cars, which are sentient vehicles with animal-like features such as ears, snouts, and tails.
• BIONICLE:
  • The first set-line, which was still branded under the LEGO Technic series, had many Mechanical Animals that had tank treads instead of legs, such as the Muaka tiger, Kane-Ra bull (and their combination model, the Kuma-Nui rat), the Manas and Mana-Ko crabs, and the Tarakava and Tarakava Nui lizards' tank treads even had working suspension. The unreleased The Legend of Mata Nui video game also had a Wolfrat, whose lower body ended in a mono-cycle, which wasn't sold as a toy but could easily be built if you had the right LEGO parts. These wheeled animals were phased out once the franchise became its own thing.
  • The Toa Terrain Crawler, a giant seafloor-bound undersea creature outfitted with a travel compartment on the inside, complete with weapon storage and medical repair bay, and an assortment of cannons on the outside.
• The second wave of LEGO Alpha Team had the Big Bad create mind control orbs that also cause mutations and released them into the ocean to transform sea creatures into living vehicles he would use to conquer the ocean.

Video Games

• A few of the local fauna from Brütal Legend qualify, unsurprising given the Heavy Metal nature of the world. The most obvious is the Razorfire Boar, an unholy union between a very angry wild boar and an even angrier chopper bike. There's a mission that requires you to ride about three of them so your army can get their first long range fighters, and a trophy can be acquired for riding one a set distance doing tricks.
  • The chicken walker of the Tainted Coil may also count, being a platform set atop two very organic chicken legs with a cage swinging about between them. It serves as a transport for members of the Tainted Coil, and Eddy gets to ride one at the start of the game. As can be seen during the army battles, though, they're quite capable of independent movement and will trash an opponent that gets too near them. Whether their natural demons or have undergone extensive body modification is open for debate give the nature of the Tainted Coil.
• Mega Man
  • Rush from Mega Man (Classic) is capable of turning into a jet, a submarine, and a bike. Justified in that he is a robot dog.
  • Mega Man Zero 2: the remaining 3 of the Four Guardians have One-Winged Angel forms that look like animal-shaped vehicles, known as "Armored Phenomena". Fefnir turns into a draconic tank, Leviathan turns into a manta ray submarine, and Harpuia turns into an eagle-shaped hoverplane. According to supplementary material, Phantom has one of these, too- but since he’s dead, he never uses it in game.
• Moshi Monsters has Rover, who's half car and half dog.
• Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream has Mayor Frocar, anthropomorphic frog on top and automobile on the bottom.
• Persona 5: Morgana, a cat, is able to transform into a bus while in Mementos, a palace in the Metaverse born from everyone's collective subconscious.
  Morgana: For some reason, "cats turning into buses" is an extremely widespread cognition among the general public.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet has Koraidon and Miraidon, a pair of draconic lizard-like legendary Pokemon who double as bikes and the players main means of transport. Miraidon, being a cyborg, actually transforms into a proper bike with functional wheels, while Koraidon, being a prehistoric creature, instead simply runs on its own four paws but oddly displays its tail and throat pouch into a pair of false "wheels".

Western Animation

• Beast Wars: After gaining a Transmetal mode, several of the Maximals and Predacons acquire new modes for their beast forms: Optimus gained a hoverboard for his gorilla mode, Cheetor gained aerial wings, and later a back thruster, for his cheetah mode, Rattrap gained a pair of wheels for his rat mode, Megatron gained skaters and a pair of thrusters for his Tyrannosaurus rex mode and Tarantulas gained motorcycle wheels for his tarantula mode.
• In the world of the Flintstones, airliners are pterodactyls with seating compartments strapped on their backs.
• The snail-cars from Chowder.
• The eponymous creatures of Dinotrux are hybrids of dinosaurs and construction vehicles: the main character is combination of Tyrannosaurus rex and excavator with wrecking ball tail, one of his friends is a combination of Brachiosaurus and crane, and so on.
• Gabby’s Dollhouse has Carlita, who's part race car, part cat. She even has the word "Car" in her name (Although "Carlita" is a real life name).
• The characters in Hot Rod Dogs and Cool Car Cats consist of canines and felines who have wheels instead of paws, engines, and other vehicular traits (such as headlights in their eyes).
• The characters of Jungle Junction all possess wheels rather than feet. Ellyvan can also be used to store things in his back, Hippobus is... well, a bus, and Dozer has a bulldozer blade attached to his front.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: The season 2 episode "Running with Scissors" introduces Dragoncycles, dragons whose arms and legs are permanently connected to wheels, and can of course be ridden like motorcycles.
• The city where Tuca & Bertie takes place in has giant snakes for subways. There's also a less often scene slug subway. One episode shows them both giving birth out of one of their cars.

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