Unbelievable Things People Have Turned Their Cars Into

In 2013, Indonesian artist Ichwan Noor rolled into the Art Basel Exhibition in Hong Kong with his Beetle Sphere, a whimsical globe-shaped sculpture made using parts from five 1953 Volkswagen Beetles. “The idea emerged from a personal perception towards objects that are products of a ‘transportation culture’, which induces hints/signs of spiritual emotion,” the artist wrote in a statement explaining his work. Noor has explored transportation themes in other works, including reshaping cars into cubes.

When Emile Leray decided to drive across a Moroccan desert, he did not expect to end up dissecting his car in order to survive. In 1993, the then 43-year-old Frenchman wrecked his Citroen 2CV in the middle of nowhere. Deciding he would never make it out alive on foot, he screwed together a makeshift motorbike from the parts of the stranded vehicle. Leray used the body of the car as shelter during the 12 scorching days it took him to build his improvised mode of transport.

In the making of the 1977 James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me,” producers reportedly forked over more than $100,000 (more than $420,000 in today’s dollars) to turn a wedge-shaped Lotus Esprit S1 into “Wet Nellie,” the film’s iconic missile-firing sports car that could transform into a submarine. The actual vehicle did not work on land and barely functioned as a submarine. The movie prop was purchased at auction by tech billionaire Elon Musk in 2013 for nearly $1 million.

Furniture made from repurposed car segments are very common. Chunks of classic cars are often converted into couches, bars, beds, and desks. But it is unusual to find these pieces with functioning features. In 2006, a British company was selling Mini Coopers that had been converted into novelty office desks. Costing thousands of dollars, they came complete with working headlights, turn signals, horns, and personalized license plates.

French artist Benedetto Bufalino is known for his car-themed art installations, including a swimming pool made from a bus and a cement truck with the mixer covered in disco ball-like mirrors. But perhaps his strangest work emerged in 2018, when Bufalino crafted a functioning wood-burning pizza oven from a Ford Mondeo station wagon. The artist started by lining the interior cabin space with oven bricks, leaving the side doors intact, and converting the passenger side windows into the oven door.

One common niche in vehicle repurposing is to use the bodies of old cars, many of them old trucks or Volkswagen Beetles, as flower beds. The internet is filled with images of old cars used as planters, flowers spilling out from trunks and pickup truck beds. For green thumbs with available landscaping space, turning an old car into a backyard planter is more creative than sending it to the junkyard.

Motorized vehicles that can traverse both land and water have been around as long as steam-powered engines have. There were even several failed attempts in the 20th century to build amphibious vehicles for consumers, such as the German-designed 1966 Amphicar. But in 2014, David March of Orange County broke records with the Panther, a Jeep the inventor converted into an amphibious vehicle that can hit 45 mph on water and 80 mph on land. March now sells his invention, called the WaterCar, for a starting price of $158,000.

Inspired by the Transformers, the media and toy franchise centered around sentient vehicles that can turn into weaponized good and evil robots, a group of engineers working for a Turkish R&D company built “Antimon,” an animatronic representation of a Transformer made from a BMW sedan. Antimon does not fly or shoot lasers, but when it is in car mode, it can be driven by remote control, and as a robot, it can move its head and do simple arm and hand movements.

Mithilesh Prasad wanted to be a pilot, but his dream was never realized. Instead, earlier this year, he converted his Tata Nano — a low cost Indian compact car — into a helicopter. Okay, it does not actually fly, but the vehicle is a fairly sophisticated engineering feat for the villager from India’s eastern Bihar state. Prasad significantly altered the body of the vehicle and added spinning rotors. It might not fly, but it certainly turns heads.

Tod Anderson did what perhaps could be considered a very appropriate Canadian thing: He turned his Smart fortwo compact car into a snowmobile. The Ottawa-area auto mechanic replaced his car’s rear wheels with two ATV aft tracks and the front wheels with skis he designed and built from scratch. The entire project reportedly took about six weeks to complete and cost about $5,300. The custom-built Smart snowmobile can do up to 40 mph, but it is not street legal, even if the streets are covered by three feet of snow.

We all know what a bookmobile is: a rolling library aimed at promoting literacy, often to areas underserved by brick-and-mortar libraries. Argentinian artist Raul Lemesoff took the concept literally in 2015, when he built a replica of a tank from a 1979 Ford Falcon that has bookshelves (holding actual books) for body panels. Lemesoff has driven his vehicle, called a “Weapon of Mass Instruction,” to rural areas to promote literacy by encouraging people to freely take the books off his “tank.”

Philadelphia sports fans can be, let’s just say, a bit fanatical. But instead of burning the jersey of DeSean Jackson for signing with a rival team, or pelting a guy dressed as Santa Claus with snowballs, or just engaging in general post-game mayhem, one unidentified Eagles fan was spotted in 2014 driving a Volkswagen Beetle that had been converted into a rolling tailgate party. The car was modified to look like an Eagles football helmet, including a faceguard that doubled as a keg stand for an attached beer tap. Talk about commitment.

As part of a campaign to dissuade commuters from texting while driving, telecommunications company Sprint hired a local ad agency to turn a wrecked car into an emoji. The mangled smiley face, placed in downtown Miami, had tires for eyes and a red car seat cushion as a tongue. At the time, Florida had no state law banning the dangerous practice of writing text messages while operating a motor vehicle. On July 1, the state became one of the last to implement a law to curb the practice.

Joe Penna (aka MysteryGuitarMan) became famous producing and posting short videos on YouTube, many of them showing the Brazil-born writer and director experimenting with sound. According Penna’s online profile, Ford provided him with a 2014 Ford Fiesta as part of a campaign to promote the subcompact car. Penna posted a video of his composition, called Musical Car Pipes, in which he uses the car’s natural sounds — the sound of ignition, the ticking of the directional signal, and of course the horn — to produce a musical composition with the help of a dozen PVC pipes, a bucket, and a wastebasket.

In case you’ve been out of the video game loop for the past 20 years, “Halo” is an incredibly popular military science fiction first-person shooter video game series — so popular it has spawned graphic novels, novels, toys, and an upcoming live-action series on Showtime. In 2017, a gearhead gamer in Michigan extensively modified a 1984 Chevrolet K-10 rugged pickup truck chassis and engine to fabricate a functioning rendition of a Warthog, the military vehicle used by the game’s earthling soldiers to battle their alien nemeses.

Toledo, Ohio, resident Kevin Mullan came up with a unique business plan: Why not take a fire truck and turn it into a mobile beer dispensary? After a prolonged search, Mullan found a farmer in Coldwater, Michigan, who had listed on Facebook a working 1987 E-One fire engine. The Toledo Blade reported in June that Mullan was nearing completion of his Ladder 419 Beer Truck that can store, refrigerate, and dispense beer or soda through 10 taps. Mullan rents the vehicle for private events and festivals, and though it cannot effectively put out fires, it does a decent job at extinguishing thirst.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has been very clear about his obsession with Mars. He wants to go there. He wants to send people there. He thinks humans need a new planet to inhabit. This might sound tinfoil hat stuff, except that Musk has backed up his vision by actually building and launching rockets into space. In February 2018, he also launched one of his Tesla electric cars into the solar system, turning a 2008 Tesla Roadster into a very expensive publicity stunt aimed at promoting his space transport company, SpaceX.

In 2017, aquarium enthusiast Andy Tate of Consett, County Durham, England, set out to indulge his hobby by converting a Nissan Micra subcompact car into a fish tank. According to the Northern Echo, Tate used 400 copies of the local newspaper to make a papier mache filler, and then he lined it with fiberglass. The entire project took 10 months. “People just think I am crackers,” he told the Echo, but perhaps he is just a fish flake.

The people over at the auto-centric news site Power Nation TV captured an online listing from Dallas showing a 1988 Cadillac DeVille that someone had modified into a high-capacity meat smoker with an attached front-end trailer. Though nothing is known about the origins of the meat machine, or if it was sold for the listed price of $1,800, numerous photos suggest strongly that the rolling smoker had been used in the past in some form of commercial BBQ-related enterprise.

Inspired by his time in the U.K. studying the purpose of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, Jim Reinders of Alliance, Nebraska, recreated the famous prehistoric monument complex out of 39 sedans stacked similarly to the way the massive stones are arranged at the archaeological site. The cars are covered completely in gray paint to match the color of the carved blocks of hard sandstone. The installation was completed in 1987 and has received about 60,000 visitors annually, according to the Carhenge website.