The Time Traveler's Guide to Zootopia

Chapter 13: Jerry Cherry

It was strange to see animals driving cars. As for Jay, it was odd to think that a wolf could drive a human in his vehicle, making everything feel so backward. Perhaps I'd be the one to stick my head out the window and enjoy the fresh gust of wind, as any dog would.

All five of us journeyed down the road, we came to the winding turn, and behold, we saw a few cars parked parallel - big, medium, and abnormally small - along the roadway. They were all about a football field away from each other and I wondered why they were all scattered until I noticed the vast number of trailheads that seemed to stretch for miles.

Could this place be as large as Yosemite?   It felt like a resurrected Earth... without people.

Finally, we made it to the first set of cars and there were about three parked cars per side. To be honest, they were all quite hideous looking and I felt bad for the owners who drove them because they were all just... hideous. The headlights were out of place, some of the cars had two horns - one that made an irritating sound and another one that made it look like an ugly unicorn - the grills made the ones from MonstersInc look decent, the tires were out of proportion, and the colors were terrible. Why would someone pick burnt brown, flushed out pink, faded purple, baby-blue, pea green, pale orange, or beige as a car color? If someone's going to buy an ugly car then they might as well pick out a decent color such as silver, white, grey, red, or any other conservative color.

I was going to verbally express my opinion about these cars but ultimately kept my mouth shut because I didn't want to offend Jay when we came across his car. With abundant minerals on Earth-77, we took great pride in how we designed our vehicles and would go the extra mile to ensure they were perfectly built. Over time, we harvested precious ores from other worlds across the outer edges of the galaxy so this enabled us to construct large vessels, capital ships, and cruisers with as much attention to detail as the human mind could comprehend. Once we took to the air, cars were rendered obsolete.

Even though the creatures on this planet haven't even reached the fifth industrial revolution, I still felt that there was no excuse to build such terrible looking cars. Maybe I was being too hard but these vehicles weren't even aerodynamic or designed to optimize fuel efficiency. When it came to cars, I felt that one could either focus on fuel efficiency and have an ugly car, or more on looks and less on fuel efficiency. Instead, all the cars here were ugly and did not seem fuel-efficient.

Then again, at least their world wasn't polluted.

However, at the corner of my eye, I saw something special. I thought it was a dream or a vision from my past simulations but it wasn't. Rather, it was something that I was hoping to see.

This car was absolutely beautiful for it made all the other cars along the road disappear from my mind. It was a compact, matte black, later mid-size sport utility vehicle with offroading capabilities along with the full suspension. It was completely decked out from front to back and had everything one could ever ask for when it came to being in the outdoors.

If we were still in my world, a vehicle such as this one would be considered fully pristine and placed in an auto museum for safekeeping. I knew what it was but wasn't sure if I could remember the name.  It didn't look exactly like the one I remembered but it was so similar. If I'm not mistaken, it was...

... a Toyota 4Runner. A Utah classic, especially in the great outdoors. That state always had the best snow on Earth, at least until it never came back due to global warming. However, this 4Runner was different because the car itself was a bit smaller compared to the ones found back on Earth-77.

Also, the car had two black pointed ears mounted on the roof with one above the passenger window and another above the driver window. The headlights were LED but they had a little yellow bulb in the middle as if it represented eyes. Wait a minute, the overall car itself seemed to represent a wolf.