If you love cars, this post is going to be eye-candy for you. We have a bunch of pictures taken by a student at a parking lot of the American University of Dubai. Reddit user Squirrelnelius, real name Meeka Nasser, put up pictures of amazing cars owned by students attending the learning institution in the Middle East.

I know Dubai is chock-full of rich folk, but just seeing all these cars parked in one place is pretty unbelievable. You can spot a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, a Bentley Continental GT, a chrome red Mercedes among hundreds of other luxury vehicles. In fact, you can see a poor Maserati left around a corner without a parking spot. Nasser said that because Cayennes and Range Rovers are a dime-a-dozen, he only included a few of them in the album.

Nasser is a student at the American University. His aim was to show the world the array of models on display at his school. “The cars that the students drive here are just ludicrous,” he said. “If I was back home in Canada, my car would be considered nice, but here nobody looks twice at it.”

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The BMW Z4 is a sleek, modern and luxurious car, famous for its incredible raw power. But not this particular Z4 from China which was transformed into a golden dragon on wheels by some overly-traditional tuners. Golden boy here features dragon wings, a tail, claws, wings as well as some other over-the-top accessories sculpted out of yak bones.

As if painting a BMW gold wasn’t bad enough, the people responsible for this extreme tuning job decided it would be a good idea to give it that traditional Chinese dragon look by decorating it with various body parts sculpted out of yak boned. The front of the car features a dragon’s snout complete with two eyes and its characteristic whiskers. The beast’s claws rest above the huge gold rims and the car’s butterfly doors have been transformed into feathered wings. At the back, the dragon’s scaly tail rests on the BMW’s trunk. The masterpiece has been exhibited at the China Import and Export fair in the southern Guangdong province, where it managed to turn quite a few heads. While it is not our cup of tea, we can appreciate the painstaking work that must have gone into carving all those scales from yak bone. We can only hope that next time, the makers of the Dragon BMW will decide to utilize their skills in creating something less tacky.

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Authorities in Sierra Leone have found a really cool and ingenious way to deal with their very undisciplined and uneducated drivers who are involved in thousands of accidents every year – a fun board game meant to be played for several months by any newbie wanting a driver’s license. Before actually being allowed to get behind the wheel, players will find themselves in realistic situations where the only way out is to give the right answers to traffic law and conduct questions.

The game, called “The Drivers’ Way”, might look like your regular board game but it has a quirky twist – the rules of the game are real driving rules and players move pieces modeled like classic cars around a colorful board as they advance. The dice is cleverly made into a traffic light but even if the light is green, players still have to tackle tough traffic law tests to go further. If they fail the tests or have a broken tail light, they get a fine, just like in real life. The game, which apparently plays a bit like Scrabble, seems easy enough if you know your signs and speed limits. Thousands of copies of the game have already been made, each costing 60,000 Leones (about $14). Sarah Bendu, executive director of Sierra Leone’s Road Transport Authority explains that “they (novice drivers) will have to pay for it. Then they will play it for two or three months, or maybe just one if they’re smart enough, then they will come for their test.”  I’m guessing that after playing it months on end, the West African country will have some seriously determined drivers.

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If you live in Yelm, Washington, be very careful where you park your vehicle because Edward Smith may have sex with it. So  far, the 62-year-old car lover (pun intended) has bedded – in lack of a better word – 1,000 cars, which makes him the world’s most promiscuous mechaphile, a colloquial word used to describe people who love machines a little bit too much or who feel an insatiable sexual attraction to cars.

Smith claims he has never been attracted to a human being in his life and that his love for cars started way back in his childhood. He actually lost his virginity to a neighbor’s Volkswagen Beetle. He has had only one female girlfriend 12 years ago but never found it in him to consummate the relationship. In fact, his sexual experience with women began and ended with a one night stand in Seattle. Ever since he can remember, he felt attracted to cars. “When I turned 13 and the famous Corvette Stingray came about, that car was pure sex and just an incredible machine. I wanted it,” he explains. “I didn’t fully understand it myself except that I know I’m not hurting anyone and I do not intend to,” he adds. He’s now in an open relationship with a second-hand Volkswagen Beetle named Vanilla, a 1973 Opel GT, called Cinnamon, and an 1193 Ford Ranger by the name of Splash, which he regularly takes for joy rides. However, his heart belongs to Vanilla for which he has real feelings. “When I hold Vanilla in my arms there’s a powerful energy that comes from her,” he says. “I would say it is extremely satisfying but at times a little melancholy because I know she cannot talk to me. But overall I know she feels what I feel and it’s intense. If anything was to happen to her I would be more than heartbroken.”

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There are so many Russian dash-cam videos on the internet that you would think 99% of all traffic accidents happen in the Federation or that Russian people are particularly passionate about video blogging every second they spend driving around. But actually, one of the main reasons dash-cams are so popular in Russia  is the high number of people willingly throwing themselves in front of moving vehicles to exploit a weird law that obliges the driver to pay for damages no matter if they are at fault or not.

According to an Al Jazeera report from last year, most people use dash-cams mainly to capture any instances where the corrupt policemen abuse their power for financial gains, and use the footage in court. The other and more bizarre reason is to protect themselves against crazy scammers that will throw themselves in front of cars and hustle the drivers for large sums of money by threatening to call the authorities. Most scammers will jump on to the hoods of slow moving vehicles to ensure they don’t get run over, but as you can see in the video compilation below, accidents have happened. Those who lack the courage to jump in front of cars, simply pretend to get hit by vehicles while holding old laptops or mobile phones and ask for compensation. Drivers trying to convince the judges they were the actual victims without solid evidence usually fail and are forced to pay damages, so dash-cams have become the only sure way of protection.

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For most artists, any surface can be used as a canvas, as this Azerbaijani man beautifully demonstrates by creating complex urban landscapes in the collected dust on cars. He discovered his talent and passion for drawing in dirt at his job as a parking attendant which he has been doing for over 10 years.

During work hours on one of the busiest streets of Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, parking attendant Rafael Veyisov wipes off the dust on cars with his fingers, slowly contouring the shapes of tall buildings and flying birds. In his artwork, he generally illustrates real towns to educate people about other countries, but sometimes he also lets his imagination run wild and produces impressive original works. Surprised by his talent, the car owners who regularly leave their vehicles in Rafael’s care, often leave them dirty just to give him an excuse to play around, and take photos of his beautiful artworks.

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They say you can’t take your worldly possessions with you when you die, but a Brazilian businessman is going to try. Following the example of Egyptian pharaohs, Count Chiquinho Scarpa decided to bury his prizes Bentley Continental in his back yard, so he can enjoy driving it in the afterlife.

62-year-old Count Scarpa, a quirky millionaire from Sao Paolo, Brazil, announced he has decided to do like the pharaohs and entomb his $500,000 Bentley Continental Flying Spur in his back garden, on Monday, via Facebook. The message came with a photo of the successful businessman holding a cockatoo on one arm while resting the other on his luxurious limousine. To assure those who doubted him that his claim was sincere, the following day Scarpa posted another photo of him holding a shovel next to a big hole in his garden, with the car parked behind him, adding that he was going to put in the ground by the end of the week. His bizarre messages got thousands of “likes”and “shares”on Facebook, and eventually got the attention of the media. Count Scarpa was invited on the “Agora É Tarde” TV show where he told host Danilo Gentili he got the idea after watching a documentary on Sunday. ‘I was watching a documentary about the pharaohs of Egypt, very interesting. They buried their entire fortune to have a comfortable life on “the other side”!’ he said.

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Seattle-based designer Taras Lesko has spent the last few months building a nearly-life-size replica of the Lamborghini Aventador exclusively out of printing paper and cardboard.

We first featured Taras Lesko’s paper masterpieces back in 2010, shortly after he had completed his amazing 4-foot-tall Freedom Gundam. In 2011 he surprised us all again with an even more impressive 7-foot Gundam made with 1,250 distinct paper parts cut out of 720 pages. Taras took a two-year-long break after that, but he has recently unveiled his latest work of art, a stunning paper-and-cardboard replica of the Lamborghini Aventador sports car. Using his design skills, the Seattle-based artist created all the necessary parts in computer programs like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and AfterEffects, printed them on hundreds of sheets of paper and used a precise X-Acto knife to cut them loose. To make sure his paper Aventador was sturdy enough to move around, Lesko used thick chipboard as a frame for the ultra-light vehicle which weighs just 11.3 kilograms.

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Growing up, Phoenix-based Austin Coulson was always fascinated by all the cool automotive records he found in the yearly Guinness Book of Records, and dreamed of one day having his name mentioned in the famous publication. He recently got his wish, after building the world’s smallest roadworthy car.

29-year-old Austin Coulson says he developed a passion for tinkering with mechanical stuff very early in life. As a young boy, he used to  ride bicycles with his friends, and always fond some parts to add or remove. When he turned 16. Austin bought his first car, a Bronco with a blown transmission. So he bought a repair manual and learned from scratch how take the thing apart and put it back together. It wasn’t easy, but he got the hang of it and he’s been building custom cars ever since. Two years ago, he saw a small go-kart with a car body on it, that made it look like a real miniature roadworthy vehicle. It got him thinking whether someone could really build such a small car and make it street legal. It also reminded Austin about his life-long dream of having his name in the Guinness Book of Records, so he started searching to see if there was already a record for the world’s smallest street-legal car. A guy from England held the record, but after seeing his creation, Coulson thought to himself “I can beat that”.

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Seen from the outside, the 2008 Nissan Patrol modified by Ali, of Kingdom Customs Garage, in Dubai, looks completely normal, but open the front door and you’ll notice a few details are missing. And by details I mean the steering wheel, pedals, shift stick…

You probably haven’t seen anything like this before, I certainly haven’t. Probably sick of sitting behind the wheel while his friends had all the fun in the back, Ali, a tuner from Dubai moved the driver’s seat to the back of his 2008 Nissan Patrol. The steering wheel now sits behind the front seats, along with the pedals, dashboard gauges, manual transmission and even the rear-view mirror. All that’s left in the front is the dashboard and a series of LED screens for the passengers to pass the time while the driver does his thing in the back. Looking at the photos below, you’re probably thinking this is either photoshopped or a just a show-off tuning job, but this thing is actually drivable, as Ali himself demonstrates in the video at the bottom of this page.

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When Knight Rider came out during the 1980s, the nearly indestructible KITT, a heavily modified Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, blew everyone away. Even today, it remains one of the coolest cars ever, and fans spend valuable time and resources building their own real-life KITTs.

One such auto enthusiast from Detroit-area recently showcased his homemade perfect replica of the famous movie car, which he spent about three years working on, in a promotional video for a car insurance company . Chris Palmer says he needed five Pontiac Trans Ams, numerous custom parts and countless hours of work to create his four-wheeled masterpiece. He also had to rely on the generosity of his friends to finance his obsession of owning his own perfect KITT, but in the end “it was totally worth it – more than worth it”. He has been dreaming of sitting behind KITT’s steering wheel ever since he was a little kid, and his obsession stuck with him throughout the years. He has owned 15 or 16 Pontiac Firebird Trans Ams since he started driving, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that he decided to take on the challenge of building a perfect replica of the Knight Industries Two Thousand.

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We’ve featured some outrageous cars on Oddity Central in the past, but this one definitely takes the cake. An automotive enthusiast from Moscow, Russia is selling a unique hot rod that is completely covered in Canadian wood bison leather. And by “completely” I mean interior, exterior and even the engine…

According to the ad posted on Russia’s biggest classifieds website, Avito, the vehicle’s fiberglass body is covered in genuine Canadian bison leather, tanned and artistically etched by a master from the Middle East. The car’s interior, including the dashboard, is also layered with brown bison leather and expensive natural furs. And as if this thing didn’t have way too much leather already, the inside of the hood, as well as the engine and several other parts are also encased in specially treated bison leather than can withstand high temperatures. The seller, known only as “Rustam“, claims the engine and trunk compartment also feature Swarovski crystal inserts.

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Jeff Bloch, a.k.a. Speedycop, is an American race-car enthusiast who likes to create all sorts of crazy contraptions for the popular 24-hour LeMons Race. His latest achievement – an upside-down vehicle he describes as “a frightening fusion of a wretched 1990 Ford Festiva and a horrible 1999 Chevy Camaro, with a not-so-subtle twist”.

Just two months after making headlines with a Cessna airplane converted into a race car, Jeff Bloch is in the spotlight once again, this time with a ridiculous upside-down car. To create this one-of-a-kind freak on wheels, he stripped off the Fiesta’s body and replaced it with the upside-down carcass of the Chevy Camaro. So he is basically driving a Ford Fiesta that looks like an inverted Camaro. The Ford’s underpowered 1.3-liter four-cylinder engine has thus been saddled with the body of the much larger car, including the extra set of wheels, making it easy prey during a race. But then again, Speedycop didn’t really build it to win the LeMons, just the attention and admiration of his fellow motorheads.

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Jerry Patrick, an automobile enthusiast from Newnan, Georgia, has been building cars for the last three decades, but a few years ago he got bored with the usual Camaros and Mustangs, so he decided to test his skills on some truly unique vehicles. Now his garage houses amazingly accurate replicas iconic cars like KITT from Knight Rider, Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine and the Batmobile.

A few years ago, Jerry Patrick decided it would be a great idea to combine his love for cars with his passion for films, so he started building functional replicas of some of the most popular vehicles in movie and TV history. The experienced builder typically has 25 to 35 cars on hand at any one time, as his projects usually require parts from multiple vehicles to create the finished product. His creations start out as beat-down old cars he finds on Craiglist, eBay or by word of mouth, but after months or sometimes years of work they become dream rides that any movie buff would consider themselves lucky to drive. Patrick’s amazing collection includes replicas of Eleanor from Gone in 60 Seconds, Herbie the Love Bug, KITT from Knight Rider, the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo and an awe-inspiring Batmobile complete with retractable machine-guns.

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Tired of dealing with the unbearable summer heat, a 27-year-old driver from Eibenstock, Germany, had the not-so-brilliant idea to turn his BMW convertible into a mobile pool, by completely sealing the passenger cabin and filling it with water.

A pool on wheels sound pretty cool, but unfortunately for its creator, the local police didn’t think so. The nutty driver and three of his friends were driving their unconventional vehicle around town last Sunday, when they passed by a motorcycle policeman who happened to see the car had no license plates and that one of the passengers was riding on the trunk. As he pursued the suspicious convertible through Eibenstock, the officer noticed something very strange: every time it turned into a curb, water poured out of the vehicle. After a short chase, the BMW pulled over in a parking lot and the passengers, who were only wearing bathing suits, ran out and jumped into the nearby Mulde River. As he approached the empty car, the policeman discovered it had been converted into a regular pool on wheels. The interior had been sealed, painted blue and filled with water. The sides of the pool were lined with wooden planks, the steering wheel was covered in raffia, and next to the ignition switch was a beer bottle holder.

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