By Nazanine Nouri
The world’s most powerful 6×6 pickup truck — dubbed ‘the god of all trucks’ — has just been unveiled by Rezvani Motors, a California-based carmaker and designer founded by Iranian-American Ferris Rezvani. The company’s celebrity clients include Jamie Foxx, Chris Brown, the pop singer Jeremih, the Iranian rapper Tohi (the company’s only known Iranian customer to date).
The car has also been featured in “Men in Black: International,” the TV series “Westworld” and “Watchmen.” Other Rezvani Motors clients include entrepreneurs as well as NBA and football players. The company defines itself as a “boutique American manufacturer of extreme supercars that are beyond the ordinary.”
We are proud to unveil REZVANI HERCULES 6×6; the ultimate on-road and off-road truck available now. Available in standard and bulletproof Military Edition specifications. also available in four different engine options including V6, V8 and top of the line 1,300 HP pic.twitter.com/fASQzU9Gl2
— Rezvani Motors (@RezvaniMotors) November 11, 2020
“What we do is we create fantasies,” Rezvani told Maz Jobrani’s new podcast “Back to School with Maz Jobrani” in December. “We provide fantasies to people who want to drive a specific car that is out of their dream.”
The new Hercules 6×6 is “easily the toughest and most powerful production truck in the world,” says Rezvani. The focus was “to be athletic in design and stance, have a refined ride and suspension, be the right size to be easily used as a daily driver, have a luxurious interior, and push the envelope in what a six-wheeled truck can be.”
Rezvani Motors has released a new model every year since 2014 and produces between 36 and 48 cars annually. The cars are 100 percent American made and can be serviced at any Jeep Dodge dealership anywhere in the world. The company currently has some licensing deals in southeast Asia, including a Rezvani Tank nightclub and a dealership.
Ferris Rezvani was born in Iran in 1975. His father was an F4 Phantom fighter pilot and he grew up surrounded by air force fighter planes and the culture of aviation. “My dad was in the Iranian Air Force under the Shah and trained in Texas as well,” he told Jobrani. “So I grew up on the Air Force base in Texas, and always wanted to become a fighter pilot in my teenage years, but for various reasons, eyesight, other things, I couldn’t.”
After obtaining a degree in software engineering from the University of California at Irvine, Rezvani worked in the software and computer industry before pursuing his passion for car design. Using knowledge obtained from the development efforts with supercar manufacturer Vencer in Europe, he founded Rezvani Motors in 2014, aiming to produce an exclusive supercar with groundbreaking performance.
“I really loved that feeling of speed and wanted to create that feeling on the ground, and also loved car design and wanted to just create badass cars,” said Rezvani. So he set out to design an extreme sports car that enabled drivers to experience the high-speed thrill of flying on the ground.
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Assembling a strong team of designers, engineers, CAD designers, prototyping engineers, and automotive engine engineers, Rezvani Motors developed its first model, the Beast – a lightweight, high performance, reasonably priced (starting price: $150,000) carbon-fiber sportscar, designed by its award-winning head of design Samir Sadikhov. (Sadikhov is renowned for his design of the Ferrari Xezri and Aston Martin DBC concept.) The company later expanded into the SUV sector, introducing the military-inspired, high tech Rezvani Tank with a Dodge engine.
Rezvani said he wanted to create something unique and different. He felt that the cars on the market “looked pretty much the same,” and the ones from bigger companies were “ridiculously expensive,” so he set out to come up with an alternative to that. (The starting price for the Tank is $155,000, which he considers very affordable for a hand-built, low-volume car.)
Rezvani partnered with his friends to start the company, friends who believed in the business and loved cars as well. The first car they produced was already pre-sold, “so it was a little bit of a no-brainer,” he sa Thanks to one of the partners who was very good at publicity, “we ended up on the homepage of Yahoo.com and once it was on Yahoo, other media carried it, we got more orders, and then it really got traction.”
In a 2017 interview with the Huffington Post, Rezvani noted: “We are competing with billion-dollar companies that have unlimited funds, so while we are the little guys, we are setting trends and doing what takes bigger companies millions of dollars to do. I am proud of what we’ve achieved with such little capital.”
