A few months ago, I blogged about how to make cars more expressive — by making brake-lights communicate more information, or by allowing the car to make facial expressions.

Now the Japanese artist Hachiya Kazuhiko has produced an even stranger idea: Giving a car a tail. Inspired by the expressiveness of dog’s tails, he installed a robotic proboscus on the back of that minivan you see above. It actually seems like a kind of a neat idea, because a tail is a nice bit of ambient information: Unlike a sign, you don’t have to stare at it directly to get data from it, so it’s less likely to distract other drivers than a pixelboard sign on the back of your car. All in all, it seems like a witty bit of design — safer, more organic, and simpler.

Until you watch the video of the thing in action and realize: Holy moses that thing looks creepy. It’s like some sort of ghastly alien finger grafted onto the back of a car. I almost shrieked when I first saw it move. Yiiiii. Yeah, I can just imagine the conversations in the car-sales-lots of the future. “Great, so, would you like your Ford Taurus to have a killer mutant appendage, or just stock equipment?”

(Thanks to Near Near Future for this one!)