Chinese car manufacturer Chery came up with an unusual marketing pitch to promote its new eQ7 electric crossover – building a tower of cars to show how durable its aluminum body is.

China’s electric vehicle production is firing on all cylinders these days, and manufacturers are coming up with all kinds of marketing strategies to get a leg up on the competition. Take Chinese company Chery, whose new eQ7 electric car hit the local market last month. It is said to strike a good quality/price balance, has an intriguing design, and has an official driving range of 412-512 km on a fully charged battery. But the same can be said about many of its competitors, so in order to make it stand out, Chery decided to focus on the strength of its LFS aluminum body, by creating a tower of no less than seven eQ7s.

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A small town in western France has gone viral for marking a busy intersection with overlapping white lines in order to confuse motorists and make them slow down.

The town of Bauné, near Angers, is home to only about 1,700 people, but it has to deal with heavy traffic on a daily basis, because of its location at the crossroads between two departmental roads – D74 and D82. Some of the roughly 2,300 that pass through Bauné every day can have speeds of over 100 km/h (60mph), even though the town’s intersection is clearly marked with signs limiting the speed at 30 km/h. In order to get drivers to slow down, local authorities came up with the idea of using confusing road markings in the form of overlapping continuous lines. Interestingly enough, the strategy worked like a charm!

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A group of car enthusiasts in Australia recently drove a 1978 Toyota Landcruiser seven kilometers on the bottom of the ocean, setting a new world record for the longest underwater drive.

On the morning of July 29th, a bright orange Toyota LandCruiser drove into the northern Australian Sea to the cheers of dozens gathered at Mandorah Beach for a historic attempt. The 1978 “rust bucket” had been bought online by a group of friends for around $5,000 and converted into an insulated electric vehicle able to drive underwater, at depths of several meters. Dubbed the “Mud Crab”, the old short-wheelbase four-wheel drive buggy was meant to cover a distance of 4.3 miles (7km), between Mandorah Beach and Darwin Harbour, and thus set a new world record for the longest distance covered by a car driven underwater.

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18Wheels Inc., an aptly-named company in Finland, has developed a strange-looking electric 18-wheel all-terrain vehicle that it claims is vastly superior to the common ATV.

The millipede-inspired design of the 18Wheels Inc. all-terrain vehicle is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Basically, it consists of a snowmobile-like body and a set of 18 small wheels each with its own individual suspension system. One of the core ideas of the project was to make this unusual-looking vehicle soil friendly, so the wheels are specifically small so that they don’t damage the soil by leaving huge tire marks on it. The unique suspension system provides a special trajectory of movement and a much smoother ride over all types of rough terrain, which can’t really be said about traditional ATVs.

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A Belarussian company specializing in agricultural machinery recently unveiled a Formula 1 car built with tractor parts that can allegedly reach speeds of up to 320km/h (198mph)

The Russian city of Yekaterinburg recently hosted the Innoprom exhibition where over 150 companies from Russia and Belarus showcased their newest agricultural, construction, and transportation machinery. However, the ultimate stand-out was not a tractor, a combine, or an excavator, but a unique-looking Formula 1 car developed by Belarusian company Minsk Tractor Plant. At first glance, it looked like a slightly unusual racing car, but the more you looked at it, the more you spotted similarities to a tractor, which makes sense, considering that it was allegedly inspired by the company’s tractor-building pedigree and built using tractor parts.

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Japanese metal processing company Yamaguchi Seisakusho has been getting a lot of attention for showcasing its capabilities by creating a very detailed wireframe car that looks almost rendered in augmented reality.

If you’ve ever played mobile video games like the widely popular Pokemon GO, you probably know a little about augmented reality or AR for short. It’s a technology that visually enhances the real world with computer-generated images, basically overlaying digital elements onto real-life environments. Looking at the photo of this white wireframe car, you’d be tempted to think that it was the product of augmented reality, but it was actually painstakingly created out of metal wire. Photos of it recently went viral on Japanese social media, because people just couldn’t believe it was real.

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Comparable in height to a skyscraper and weighing a whopping 13,500 tons, the German-made Bagger 288 holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest excavator.

Here at oddity Central, we love big, heavy machinery! In fact, we just featured the world’s largest dump truck, the BelAZ-75710, a Belarussian behemoth capable of carrying a load of over 500 tons. However, this metal monster looks positively tiny next to the world’s largest excavator. A one-of-one, the Bagger 288 giant excavator was produced in 1978 by German company Krupp and has been holding on to the title of ‘world’s largest excavator’ ever since. It can go through 240,000 cubic meters of rock per day, and is used to produce around 8.5 million tons of coal per year.

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Trucks aren’t usually built for speed, but in the right hands they can become faster than any commercially-available supercar, and there’s no better proof than the legendary Shockwave, the fastest truck ever built

Originally built by the legendary Les Shockley in 1984, Shockwave was modified by Darnell Racing Enterprises and is still the Guinness record holder for ‘the world’s fastest jet truck’. The heavily-modified Peterbilt Semi had literally nothing under the hood, but that’s because a jet truck doesn’t need a diesel engine. Instead, this powerplant on wheels featured three Pratt & Whitney J58s jet engines at the back, which could develop a total of 36000 bhp to propel Shockwave forward at, well, shocking speeds. It could cover a quarter mile in 6.5 seconds, while a supercar like the Lamborghini Aventador does it in “only” 10.4 seconds.

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The Xian Mangia is a fully functional electric double-cabin truck that not only costs under $3,000, but can also be shipped right to your doorstep.

A few years back, we wrote about the world’s cheapest electric car, the Changli Nemeca, a petite box on wheels that cost just $930 and could be delivered straight to the client’s home. Well, apparently, the idea of a super-affordable electric vehicle that could be delivered at home rather than be picked up from a dealership stuck, because there is now a variety of different EVs to choose from, including a double-cabin truck that costs less than a midrange PC. The Xian Mangia can be ordered online from Chinese shopping giant Alibaba, for just $2,920 and will arrive at your door in 15 – 20 days.

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The BelAZ-75710 is a Belarussian ultra-class truck that has held the title of the world’s largest haul truck for the last 10 years.

Launched in 2013, the BelAZ-75710 managed to put the BelAZ brand back on the map. Back in the Soviet era, the company based in the Belarusian city of Zhodino made the largest and most powerful mining trucks in the world, but after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was surpassed by Western manufacturers like Caterpillar, Liebherr or Bucyrus, all of which have held the title of ‘world’s largest truck’ with some of their models at some point in time. But, a decade ago, BelAZ reclaimed its throne with a behemoth that puts all other ultra-class trucks to shame in terms of size and load capacity.

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The Ottomeyer Mammut is the largest plow ever made. It was created for the specific purpose of converting bogs into agricultural land and could cut channels in the ground to a depth of over 2 meters.

The bog areas of the Emsland district in Northern Germany, on the border with the Netherlands, had been determined uninhabitable since the 1700s, but in the early 20th century, the government of Western Germany decided that the region had fallen behind the rest of the country economically and needed to be converted into arable land. That was easier said than done, however, as the bogs had kept farmers away for hundreds of years, but the Germans had an ace up their sleeve – Otto Meyer, a brilliant engineer and inventor who specialized in steam tractors and difficult soil cultivation.

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A Swedish electric vehicle manufacturer hopes to become the IKEA of small EVs by shipping its cars as individual parts that can be assembled at their final destination.

Luvly, a Swedish start-up specializing in small and affordable electric vehicles, has announced plans to ship its tiny cars as flat packs to be assembled at their final destination. The company claims that this unusual model will allow it to fit 20 of its cars into a container that would otherwise only have room for 4 assembled vehicles, thus lowering transportation costs considerably. However, the Swedish manufacturer clarified that, unlike IKEA furniture, its electric vehicles are not meant for home assembly. Instead, the flat packs will end up at micro-factories where they will be quickly put together by specialized staff to ensure complete safety.

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A Vietnamese architecture student and diehard fan of The Dark Knight spent six months building his very own Batpod with the help of a team of friends.

Born in 1998, Nguyen Dac Chung was just a child when Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight hit cinemas, but the movie made such a big impact on him that he grew up dreaming of one day driving his own Batmobile and Batpod on the streets of his native Hanoi. He fulfilled half of that dream in 2020, when he built a functional replica of the Tumbler, Batman’s impressive Batmobile from the Dark Knight series, and earlier this month he completed his goal by unveiling a cool DIY Batpod as well.

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Kleine Johanna a 4,800-pound behemoth built almost entirely out of scrap metal, was recently acknowledged as the heaviest rideable bicycle in the world by the Record Institute for Germany, a national version of the Guinness Book of Records.

You’ve probably seen chunky bikes before, but surely nothing quite like Kleine Johanna. This unique contraption measures over 5 meters in length, is almost 2 meters tall, and weighs about 4,800 lbs (2,177 kg). That’s more than most sedans, so how on earth is anyone supposed to get it in motion with pedal power alone? Well, according to its creator, Sebastian Beutler, who lives in Köthen, a town in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt state, it’s all thanks to the truck gearbox adapted to enhance the classic bicycle gear system. Kleine Johanna has 35 forward gears and 7 reverse gears and can not only be pedaled into motion by a single person, but it can also tow up to 15 tonnes, without any problems.

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The Beast is a legendary 1970s muscle car powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 airplane engine that can produce over 750hp and has a fuel consumption of around 2.35 mpg.

The story of The Beast goes back to 1966, when English engineer Paul Jameson decided to find out what would happen if someone put a tank engine in a street-legal custom car. Jameson created a custom rolling chassis for the car and fitted it with a Rolls-Royce Meteor tank engine, before turning to transmission expert John Dodd to commission an automated transmission for the unique car. Dodd became intrigued by Jameson’s wacky idea, so when its original creator put the project on hiatus for a while, he ended up buying it from him and completing it himself. It was a labor of love, one that eventually became known as one of the most impressive automotive projects in English history.

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