An Avatar homage in the garage? Well, not this year.

But Mercedes brought one to CES for 2020. The idea behind the concept is a simple one: to link car and driver until they become one organism. Less Zen intuition than cyberpunk alteration, and less cyberpunk alteration than Cylon integration. Then again, hopefully not.

Why haven’t Cameron and his cineaste cronies pumped out at least one sequel since the first film hit silver screens in 2009? Apparently, the next installments are on the way. The first could see the fantastical dark of your local theater this year, in fact.

In the meantime, you may want to cast your brown eyes on this peculiarly atmospheric Mercedes, which carries the spirit of the films. It’s an EV, of course, and it’s called the Vision AVTR. The Vision prefix is familiar to anyone who’s been following Mercedes—and BMW—EV concepts over the past few years, the latest of which was the S-Class-concept Vision EQS. AVTR, on the other hand, speaks for Cameron, and his hopeful vision of an anthropomorphic, highly intelligent species and its evolution.

Voicing biological forms in automotive design isn’t new territory for Mercedes. Chief designer and creative guiding spirit Gorden Wagener has been embedding graceful natural shapes into Merc models for over ten years, producing some of the more organically literate and strikingly fluid concept and production cars of the last decade, including Maybach’s S650, introduced in 2018, and the so-called ‘6 Cabriolet’ concept from the year before. Both are worth a look, even in hindsight.