What Swiss business man Ueli Anliker calls the car of his dreams, could very well be the one of your nightmares. He’s taken the classy, exclusive Mercedes McLaren SLR, and created a monster.

Anliker was apparently not satistfied with what the car had to offer, and so set out on a mission to transform it into his vision of the perfect SLR. A team of thirty five people worked on it, spending 30,000 hours and over £ 3.5 million ($5.5 million) . The transformed vehicle is called the Anliker McLaren SLR 999 Red Gold Dream. He’s made changes to the paintwork, wheels, interiors and even the engine. Twenty-five layers of red paint with 5kg of gold dust were used on the body of the car. The wheels, headlights and door sills are all covered in 24 carat gold. The indicators inside the car are jeweled, the seat covers and interiors gold trimmed, and the switchgear is covered in rubies. The power on the existing 5.4 litre engine has been boosted to 999bhp from 640bhp. This has caused the top speed to increase to 210 mph. A total of 600 rubies have been used in re-decorating the exclusive Mercedes.

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Qu Zhibo, a chef from Zigong City, China’s Sichuan Province, spent three years and just 4,000 yuan ($628) building his own knockoff Jeep. His efforts have made him somewhat of an Internet celebrity, in China.

I was convinced Chinese car enthusiasts can be very resourceful when it comes to building their own dream cars after seeing photos of a young man working on his home-made Lamborghini, so Qu Zhibo’s achievement just comes as a confirmation. Because he was busy running his own restaurant, Qu Zhibo took three years to complete work on his 2-meters-long, 1.5-meters-high Jeep, but he did use just 600 bucks to do it. The car, which many Chinese netizens called a “knockoff Hummer” was actually inspired by an American military vehicle, and even though right now it pretty much looks like a pile of junk on wheels, a bit of camouflage paint could go a long way.

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Artist Ian Cook has a unique painting style which involves dipping remote-controlled cars in paint and driving them across the canvas to create colorful contemporary artworks.

Nicknamed “Pic-cars-so”, 28-year-old Cook has developed a special painting style known as “Auto Drawing”. He uses various remote-controlled toy cars to spread acrylic paint across the canvas, creating incredibly detailed masterpieces. “I wanted to be an artist from a young age and decided that to be successful I needed something completely unique,” Ian says about his bizarre choice of “brushes”. “I’ve always been mad about anything with wheels and I figured that using cars to paint cars would capture peoples’ imaginations, so I experimented at home by driving some remote control models through paint.” Believe it or not, the idea first came to him after he got a remote-controlled car for Christmas and was told not to get paint on it.

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We’re all used to purchasing fast food from trailers, trucks, vans and even push-carts. But from a tiny Smart car? Now that’s something new.

This innovative concept comes to Austin, Texas all the way from Germany. Two German youths who arrived in Dallas a few years ago as exchange students, have brought with them something unique from their homeland. Michael Heyne and Dominek Stein sell the Doener Kebap from a Smart car.

The dish is actually kind of similar to the Greek gyro sandwich. The German version, Doener Kebap consists of large shavings of chicken or beef. These slices are cooked on a vertical rotisserie grill and are served with a variety of vegetables and sauces, all bundled up in a piece of pocket bread. The origins of the dish lie in Turkey and it was brought over to Germany sometime in the 1970s. But the dish is only a part of the attraction. What brings people in, is the innovative manner in which it is sold.

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As a kid, cars play a big role in life as they are generally boys’ favorite toys. If you’ve got a father that’s as passionate about cars as you, you may end up going to a motor show and seeing them live.

Once you’re there however, things go a little bit wrong, after the ten or so supercars and a couple of off-roaders you realize it’s not really that interesting. There’s just tons of boring cars for daddy, mommy and whoever else can actually drive. Since odds are that you’re still calling the models “pretty women” there’s no appeal in that either. Car shows aren’t always as fun as you’d imagine they could be when you’re five years old. Unless you went to the LA Motor Show this year.

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Luca Bordin is a big fan of American trucks, and since he couldn’t get his hands on a real rig, the Italian handyman decided to build his own Peterbilt 359.

Luca, who lives in Venice, Italy, told Wired Magazine he finds European truck small and dull compared to the American behemoths, but even if he could afford to buy a real big rig, it would never fit through the narrow streets of his home city in Northern Italy. So after seeing a YouTube video of a Dutchman driving around in a 1/4 scale replica truck, he decided to build his own Peterbilt 359, just to see if he could do a better job. Making model trucks was never really a big passion of his, but after seeing that video, the challenge was just too hard to resist.

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The Superbus looks more like a very long Lamborghini than a regular bus, but it’s able to transport 23 people over long distances at speeds of up to 250 km/h.

The world’s first superbus was developed at the Delft University of Technology, in Holland, under the supervision of professor Wobbo Ockels, who in 1985 became the first Dutch astronaut to travel in outer space. He thought trains were too slow for present day needs and also have the disadvantage of traveling only between stations, so he set out to build a super vehicle that could travel at lightning speeds and be eco-friendly at the same time. He and his team spent three years working on the Superbus, and the result is nothing short of impressive.

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The Toilet Bike Neo is a toilet-bike hybrid that runs entirely on biogas (human poop). It was created by TOTO, Japan’s biggest toilet manufacturer as part of a campaign to reduce CO2 emissions in toilets by 50% until 2017.

Believe it or not, we may have been looking for alternatives to fossil fuels in all the wrong places. Making biodiesel, harnessing the power of the sun, even using electrical batteries sounds way to complicated when apparently all we need to do to power our vehicles is answer the call of nature. Japanese toilet company TOTO has been working on a poop-powered tricycle called Toilet Bike Neo that actually has a toilet for a seat and runs only on human feces. The technology used to convert waste into fuel for the bike hasn’t yet been made public, but details are slowly emerging on the company’s blog.

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I’m not a very big fan of Ford’s new Explorer SUV, but I have to say I’m impressed with the life-size LEGO model created by workers at Legoland Florida.

You’re probably thinking a Mustang or a Ford GT would have looked a lot cooler than a LEGO Explorer, and you’d be right, but you have to agree commissioning a LEGO model of a family car and displaying at a family attraction like Legoland Florida makes a lot more sense, from a marketing point of view. So the American auto-maker asked Legoland workers to make a realistic model of their new Ford Explorer exclusively out of LEGO, and really got its money’s worth. 22 people worked 2,500 hours piecing together this incredibly detailed replica. In total, they used 382, 858 bricks.

The LEGO Ford Explorer weighs an impressive 2,654 pounds, more than half of the original car’s weight (4,503 pounds). It will be exhibited at the Legoland Florida theme-park where it will hopefully boost sales of the original model.

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Three German friends set out to recreate one of the most impressive cars ever made – Mercedes 300 SLR ‘Uhlenhaut Coupe’ – out of pieces of scrap metal. It’s not drivable, but their replica is definitely easy on the eyes.

Armin Ciesielski, Peter Brakel and Walter Willer, three friends working at a German company called Giganten aus Stahl (Giants of Steel), decided to pay homage to one of the greatest cars ever made, by making a life-size model out of metal. The three sculptors sourced thousands of pieces of metal for their recycled masterpiece and spent seven months cutting and putting it together. Although Ciesielski claims he could rebuild any car out of crap metal, he admits this particular project was a rather difficult one because of all the intricate details and the work that went into making even the car’s engine identical to the original.

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A Tata Nano, which usually sells for $3,000 has been converted into one of the most expensive cars in the world, after it’s been plastered with $4.6 million worth of gold and jewelry.

The Nano was a welcome innovation designed to bring affordable transportation to Indian masses, and though it may not have all the features we’ve grown accustomed to in the western world, the tiny car achieved its goal. But there is nothing affordable about Tata’s latest publicity stunt for the Nano – they’ve teamed up with Titan Industry-owned Goldplus jewelry chain and decided to create the most expensive Tata Nano ever. After covering it with kilograms of gold, silver and jewelry, the price of the world’s cheapest car went from $3,000 to $4.6 million. Now that’s quite a makeover.

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As a child, Megan Ashton dreamed of being whisked away to her wedding in a classic Porsche 356, and since she couldn’t afford a real one, she spent six years converting an old Volkswagen Beetle into the car of her dreams.

26-year-old Megan has always been interested in cars, and growing up in her dad’s garage she learned a little something about classic cars. Her personal favorite has always been the Porsche 356 – the first model ever produced by the German car manufacturer – but getting her hands on an authentic model would have proved too expensive for the young Air Engineer Officer in the Royal Navy, so she decided to build her own, instead. The 356 was created by Ferdinand Porsche, son of Porsche’s founder, and shared many parts with the VW Beetle, to make it more affordable. So the car enthusiast paid just £200 for a 1969 Beetle, in 2004, when she was still a student and planned to convert it into the classic jewel of her dreams.

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German model maker Robert Gülpen has built the most expensive car model in the world – a 1:8 scale replica of the Lamborghini Aventador made from carbon, platinum gold and decorated with precious stones.

52-year-old Gülpen, who describes his creation as a “high-tech work of art” said he wanted to create something unique that has never been done before. A former mechanical engineer, Gülpen started making miniature car models from precious metals in the late 1990s and eventually became a renown miniature car model maker. He decided the cutting edge Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 would be the perfect choice for his greatest masterpiece.  The body of the car is made from carbon, just like the original, and features around €2 million-worth of precious metals and stones. Metal was used for the detailed rims and diamonds were inserted into the seats, steering wheel and headlights.

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The young men of Saudi Arabia’s Abha region have a rather peculiar pastime: they like to build rock structures on which they display their cars.

Abha, a city in south-western Saudi Arabia has a moderate climate and features green landscape which make it a popular getaway for tourists from all over the country and other neighboring lands. Over 1.5 million people come to spend their weekends and vacations here, and that number is about to grow thanks to a new and intriguing attractions – the unique car displays in the countryside around Abha.

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A craftsman from Kaiyuan, northeast China, has created a rideable bicycle using more than 10,000 wooden popsicle sticks.

It took him four long months to finish it, but 35-year-old Sun Chao doesn’t regret one second of the time he put into the world’s first popsicle stick bicycle. At 1.5m long, 0.55m wide, 0.95m high and 25 kg heavy, it’s smaller than the average bicycle, but works just as well. Sure, those wooden wheels don’t provide the comfort of air-inflated ones, but Sun Chao rode it for 20 minutes, when he unveiled it in the city square, on June 1, and he didn’t complain. It’s worth noting he is 90 kg heavy, but the popsicle stick bike easily handled the weight. The only metal parts used on this unusual bicycle were the chain and bearings.

Sun Chao says he first became interested in working with wooden popsicle sticks 12 years ago, after seeing a guy make a ship model from them and giving it to his girlfriend, on TV. He was so inspired he started making a small desk lamp from popsicle sticks. Since then he’s made all kinds of stuff from them, including photo frames, building models, tissue boxes, but nothing nearly as impressive as this working bicycle. Just in case you were wondering, he didn’t actually buy 10,000 ice-creams, only the sticks.

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