Scaled-down sports cars recently attracted the attention of motorists all over the world, after videos of Arab drivers in Kuwait drifting in veritable adult toy cars went viral on social media. They look like kids’ toys, but they definitely have some serious power under the hood, if the viral clips are to be believed.

Photos: End of S.T.A.Y. Art Studio

A quick online investigation revealed these big boy toys to be the work of End of S.T.A.Y. Automotive, an art studio based in Shanghai, China, that has been producing “junior” versions of iconic sports cars for years. Only they don’t focus purely on design; they make sure the small vehicles feel fun to drive as well.

Founded by an aerospace engineer and a multimedia artist, with educational and professional backgrounds that include the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, leading engineer of the 3D Printing Laboratory at Eastern Airlines, director of the Public Art Department at the East China Architectural Design & Research Institute, and Harvard University China Arts Media Lab, among others, End of S.T.A.Y. Automotive blends art and automotive engineering in a very unique way.

Equipped with a 3,000W to 4,000W electric motor, junior cars can reportedly reach a top speed of 100 km/h (60 mph). They feature rear-wheel drive that makes them perfect for drifting and donut driving, and they even come with a realistic engine sound simulator to really recreate the experience of driving an iconic sports car.

Junior sports cars are about 2.2 meters long, depending on the model, and can support weights of up to 300 kilograms. The adjustable seat system is designed to comfortably accommodate drivers from 140 to 190 cm tall. Buyers can customize the body color, decal design, interior, wheel design, and rear wing to suit their individual tastes, but End of S.T.A.Y. Automotive explains that the level of customization can affect delivery times.

Apart from the Porsche 964, End of S.T.A.Y. Automotive’s portfolio of junior cars includes miniature versions of the Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86, Mazda RX-7, and the Nissan GTR R34, among others. Some sources report that prices start at approximately $5,000 USD for some models, but the only available junior model at the time of this writing, the Porsche 964, is priced at $8,800.

Are these little speed demons road-legal? Well, it depends on where you live, I guess.

It’s not every day that French police pull over a sports car with an estimated value of 200,000 euros ($250,000), but one driven by a homeless person? That never happens! And yet, that appeared to be the case, as a quick check revealed that the person behind the wheel of the Ferrari had been claiming welfare benefits for years.

Asked who the car belonged to, the motorist said that it was his mother’s, but records showed that it had been registered by a real-estate company managed by the suspect, his mother, and two siblings. A subsequent investigation revealed a complex scheme to syphon funds from the French state and evade taxes by not declaring any revenue

The driver and his family lived a lavish lifestyle, indulging in luxury shopping and traveling to upscale destinations, but on paper, they had declared themselves unemployed and insolvent, which meant they benefited from financial assistance from the CAF (French family allowance fund). Despite earning considerable amounts of money from their real-estate business and other activities, none of it had ever been declared and taxed.

In total, the fraudsters allegedly embezzled no less than €1.8 million ($2.1 million) in social benefits, in addition to more than €1.6 million ($1.9 million) in undeclared income. The family was arrested following a series of raids in multiple locations, and will soon be tried by the court in Draguignan for “undeclared work, aggravated money laundering, misuse of company assets and fraud”.

At the end of November, Russian media began reporting on a large number of Porsche cars across the country, from Moscow to Krasnodar, refusing to turn on. Some owners parked their cars in front of their homes only to discover the following morning that they had become expensive decorative pieces, while others stopped for quick errands to find that their vehicles wouldn’t start.

Rolf, Russia’s largest dealership group, reported a spike in the number of service requests from Porsche owners, as their vehicles mysteriously shut down and refused to start up again. A quick diagnostic revealed that the mass shutdown was linked to the cars’ built-in Vehicle Tracking System (VTS), which communicates with satellites to track the vehicle’s location.

Something or someone severed the connection between the cars’ VTS units and Porsche’s satellites, which activated the engine immobilizer and turned the cars into giant paperweights. The problem affects all Porsche models and engine types equipped with VTS units, which basically means every Porsche produced after 2013.

“Currently, there is no connection for all models and types of internal combustion engines,” Rolf’s service director Yulia Trushkova told Russian news outlet RBC. “Any vehicle can be blocked. Currently, the blocking can be bypassed by resetting the factory alarm unit and disassembling it. We are continuing to investigate the issue and the mechanics’ options for unlocking the vehicles.”

Rolf said that the satellite connection could have been severed deliberately or accidentally, but so far, there is only speculation. Porsche has yet to shine a light on this issue, and no hacker group has claimed responsibility for the mass shutdown.

As they wait for answers that may never come, Porsche owners are forced to look for solutions outside of official channels. Some reported that disassembling the VTS completely brought their cars back from the dead, while others said that resetting the unit by disconnecting the battery for ten hours or more worked.

The man, whose name has not been revealed by German media, told police in Ludwigsburg that he had realized something was wrong with his used Mercedes GLE the moment he pushed the brake pedal after buying it at an auction. The car barely slowed down, no matter how hard he slammed the brakes, so he called a tow truck and took it straight to a repair shop.

Photo: Ludwigsburg Police

Upon inspecting the brake system, the mechanics found that instead of authorized brake pads, the SUV was equipped with wooden pads with the ‘Brembo’ brand scribbled on them in permanent marker. They offered almost no stopping power and had already damaged the vehicle’s disks.

“This is not even amateurism, but criminal sloppiness,” Hans Bauer, a technical safety expert who helped with the investigation, told the German newspaper Stuttgarter Nachrichten, adding that the wood wears out almost instantly when rubbing against the metal disks and has no chance of stopping a 2-tonne vehicle.

Photo: Ludwigsburg Police

German police have opened a criminal case against the former owner for interfering with a car’s critical security elements, but their reason for replacing the vehicle’s brake pads with wooden blocks remains unknown.

If you’re one of those parents with more money than sense, this scaled-down version of the legendary 1950s-60s Mercedes-Benz SL300 can be yours for just under $50,000. Advertised as the perfect toy car for kids and adults alike, this fully functional automobile features all the bells and whistles of the original, including the lateral axhausts, dash gauges and switches, as well as the iconic Mercedes badge. It has an impressive load capacity of 120 kilograms and is powered by a 1.5 kW electric motor that allows it to reach speeds of up to 45 km/h.

Complete with adjustable leather seats, an aluminum instrument panel, a transmission mode selector, a subwoofer, and functional lights, the miniature Mercedes-Benz SL300 is obviously no joke. At 4 million rubles ($49,000), it costs more than most decent full-sized cars, but in Russia, it is being advertised as a toy for children and adults alike.

The unique miniature is sold by ALEKSEY MERCEDES, a high-end car dealership in Russia that specializes in both full-size and miniature replicas of luxury vehicles.

In 2019, Czech police started receiving reports about a red Formula 1 racecar speeding on motorways. The vehicle was caught on surveillance cameras and authorities were even able to track down the suspect, but because the driver was always wearing a visor helmet, he was impossible to identify, so the case against them was dropped. For the next six years, the legend of the phantom racecar driver only grew in the central European country, and police struggled to identify them. Lady Luck finally smiled upon them last Sunday, when the red racecar was spotted at a gas station near Dobříš, about 25 miles southwest of Prague. Police managed to follow the phantom driver to a property in the village of Buk, 37 miles from the Czech capital.

Photos and videos from the historic apprehension of the elusive racecar driver show him being towed by another vehicle to a private property, with the police close behind. When asked to exit the car, the unnamed 51-year-old man tells police to get off of his property because they are trespassing. After arguing with them for a few minutes, the man agrees to be taken to a local police station for questioning.

Unfortunately for the police, the suspect refused to answer most of the questions he was asked, and his son told local reporters that he and his family knew nothing about the illegal activities police are accusing them of.

“Police allegedly saw us towing a Formula 1 car, which they claimed had been speeding along the motorway a few minutes earlier – of course we know absolutely nothing about this,” the driver’s son said.

Dressed in a red Formula 1 racing suit and wearing a visor helmet, the Czech phantom driver denied having ever driven the vehicle – identified as a Dallara GP2/08 Formula 2 car used between 2008 and 2010 – on the motorway, and because all photo and video evidence gathered by police always show the driver with a helmet, it’s impossible to prove it was the same person.

“Racing cars of this type are not legally allowed to be driven on roads because they do not meet the legal technical requirements,” Czech police said in a statement. “The formula car has sharp edges and does not have lights, turning signal lights, license plates, or other important safety features. Driving a formula car or other such racing car is dangerous not only for the driver himself, but also for other road users.”

If found guilty, the phantom driver faces a fine of 5,000 to 10,000 Czech koruna ($240-$480) and a driving ban of six months to a year.

Driving through Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, you’re likely to see taxis with large rectangular boxes mounted on the roof and large tubes extending from them and into the cabin, through a rear window or through a hole cut into the roof. They are handmade cooling devices meant to replace the cars’ built-in air-conditioning systems, which tend to break down when they are most needed and cost a fortune to repair. Similar to industrial evaporative air cooling installations, these boxes can lower temperatures by 12 degrees Celsius through water evaporation, they are less noisy than air conditioning systems and consume way less power. They’re just not meant for vehicle installation.

“These cars’ AC systems didn’t work, and repairs were too expensive. So I went to a technician, [and] had a custom cooler made,” one taxi driver told AFP.

“This works better than air conditioning,” another driver said. “ACs only cool the front. This cooler spreads air throughout the car.”

 

With temperatures often exceeding 40 degrees Celsius during the summer months, taxi drivers have to get creative to keep passengers cool and these evaporative air coolers have proven very reliable and cheap to maintain.

The owner of a Li Auto L9 luxury SUV from Liaoning, China, has been accused of animal cruelty after turning a transparent layer of plastic on the hood of his car into a mobile aquarium full of large fish and crabs. Watching the viral Douyin (TikTok) video of the man’s car for the first time, you’d be tempted to think it was AI-generated, but several Chinese news outlets have confirmed that it’s a real thing. The man who came up with the ingenious idea was even interviewed about his bizarre invention and said that he came up with it during a fishing trip when he forgot to bring a container for the fish. He noticed the transparent plastic layer on the hood of his SUV and thought to himself that he could keep the fish in there.

Noticing that his SUV featured an isolated compartment between the vinyl wrap and a protective TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) film on the hood, the crafty motorist decided to fill the space with water and insert the catch of the day in there. His hood started attracting attention the moment he returned to the city, and videos of it started going viral on social media.

Although the car owner reportedly seemed proud of his idea and the attention it attracted, the general reactions were critical, with some people going as far as accusing him of animal cruelty. People pointed out that the DIY aquarium was right over the motor, which could cause the water to overheat, while others worried about the tight space the live marine creatures had to survive in.

 

The widespread attention the modified Li Auto L9 got on social media over the last few days also attracted the attention of Liaoning’s traffic police, which deemed the man’s car unfit for driving on public roads in its altered state. It’s unclear if the man was fined for his stunt, but police warned motorists that aquarium car hoods were illegal.

The so-called Flat Fiat looks like something made with AI, but it’s the very real creation of a young car mechanic who wanted to build the world’s narrowest drivable car. Although it retains most of the parts of the 1993 Fiat Panda, Andrea Marazzi’s special model is only 50 centimeters wide, enough space for just a driver, and a single headlight to help the driver see at night. Marazzi spent 12 months hand-building the Flat Fiat using ‘99 percent of the original parts’ of the 1993 Fiat Panda it is based on, even retaining the four wheels, despite its’ ultra-skinny frame.

The full-electric Flat Fiat stands at 145 cm tall, is 340 cm long, and is just 50 cm wide, with a negligible weight of only 264 kilograms (582 lbs). Due to its modest frame, the car reaches a top speed of only 15 km/h (9.3 mph) and has a battery autonomy of 25 km (15.5 miles) on a single charge. Those aren’t the most impressive figures, but then again, the Flat Fiat is not a road-legal vehicle, just a crazy project designed to draw attention and promote Marazzi’s junkyard business.

“It all started here, in our junkyard, but above all, with a crazy idea. Imagination, patience, and days of work,” Marazzi said. “A year of cutting, welding, mistakes, and laughter. A year pursuing something that no one had ever done: the narrowest Panda in the world.”

 

After going viral with his unusual car, Marazzi is now focusing his energy on an official application for Guinness World Record recognition as the narrowest car ever built.

Car companies have invested billions of dollars into advanced automated parking solutions to relieve human drivers of the stress of parallel parking or backing up into tight spaces. Some systems have turned out better than others, but unless you’re willing to pay a fair bit extra for such an advanced system, you’re stuck with your own human parking skills. But what if there was a way to have your old or cheap car parked automatically without even having to keep the engine running? South Korean company Hyundai has developed an ingenious parking robot that can glide under virtually any kind of car, lift its wheels, and then park it perfectly in a designated parking spot.

With fully autonomous vehicles still a thing of the distant future, valets may have considered themselves safe from the robot revolution, but that’s just because most of them haven’t seen Hyundai’s WIA parking robot network in action. Unveiled last year, WIA consists of flat metal slabs no taller than 110 mm that are actually sleek robots that slide under vehicles of up to 2.2 tonnes, deploy pairs of metallic arms to lift all four wheels, and then park the car better than any human ever could.

Hyundai’s flat parking robots are equipped with cameras and LiDAR, and can move at 1.2 meters per second, working in tandem, like metal ballet dancers, to move cars into parking spaces. In its original demonstration, the South Korean developer said that QR codes make the robots’ job a lot easier, helping them pair each car with its designated parking space.

In less than a year since the unveiling of the WIA parking robot system, Hyundai has already implemented the system at its Seongsu office building in Seoul, as well as the Singapore Innovation Center, with videos of the metal slabs at work showing just how well it works. The company’s Smart Parking Control System can reportedly operate up to 50 robots simultaneously.

Interestingly, a very similar robot was showcased by Chinese company Shenzhen Shanyi Technologies, only that one was used to quickly lift illegally parked vehicles and free up streets and parking spaces much more effectively than tow trucks.