Ghazal-1! Ghazal-1! Looking like something from the background of a mid-90s cartoon, the Ghazal 1 is Saudi Arabia’s first and most earnest attempt to break into this “automobile manufacturing” fad. Saudi Arabia, as we all know, has far too much oil sitting beneath their windswept sand dunes, and dagnabbit, they just can’t give it away! And what with the fuzz putting the kibosh on all of those crazy Youtube hoonage videos (in nearby Dubai, anyway), well, they gotta get rid of all that black gold somehow. And what better way than to rip a page from our playbook?

We’ve been burning their oil with gas-guzzling SUVs for decades now, it’s about time they tried it themselves. The Ghazal 1 was designed and built by students from the King Saud University, which is a pretty cool project to work on when you’re in college and aren’t allowed to drink. Featuring the blessing of King Abdullah, the vehicle is 90% home-grown Saudi, with foreign input coming from Motorola, Mercedes-Benz (who supplied the G-Class chassis) and Magna Canada. Ambitious goals for the engineering team involve producing 20,000 models a year at $100,000 a pop—a perfect weekend car for your average sheik to bomb across the Arabian Peninsula, blaring “Rock the Casbah” for maximum ironic effect. Hey, you keep burning it, and they’ll keep building it.

But first, the team will need a 500-million-dollar investment from outside sources to build Saudi Arabia’s first car. At that rate, the country’s pesky oil “surplus” will be taken care of by the time BP CEO Tony Hayward decides to care about the “small people.” Put a snorkel on it and float it through the Gulf, and maybe some of that oil won’t go to waste!

[Source: King Saud University News, Autoblog]