Indian taxi driver Harpreet Dev is well-known in his hometown of Bhatinda, Punjab, for his amazing reverse driving skills. The 30-year-old has been driving his cab in reverse for the past 11 years. Harpreet is so used to it now that he says he doesn’t trust himself to drive forwards anymore! He even has a special government license that allows him to drive backwards in any state in the northern part of India.

Harpreet’s passion for reverse driving started in 2003, when his faithful Fiat Padmini  got stuck in reverse gear late one night. “I was outside the city, I had no money, so I thought of driving the car backwards until Bhatinda,” he said. “Then I drove backwards and later on I gained confidence.”

That’s when he realised that he was really on to something, so the next morning he painted the words ‘Back Gear Champion’ on the side of the car and redesigned its gearbox to have four reverse gears and only one forward.

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Hamilton Scotts, a high-class apartment condominium in Singapore, is offering its residents the ultimate luxury in terms of parking – an individual two-car garage located inside each apartment! A glass wall separates the garage from the living room, offering a lovely view of their expensive cars from the couch.

The system is quite simple – when residents enter the building, they need to park their cars inside a glass elevator shaft. The elevator then raises the vehicle up to the corresponding condo and parks it within a glass enclosure that is visible from the living room.

Although the Hamilton Scotts condo numbers 30 floors and tens of thousands of square meters of living space, there just wasn’t enough to build a multi-level parking for the residents. Faced with this challenge, the team of architects and engineers in charge of development came up with something so much better.

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While most Batman fans are content with collecting Batmobile action figures, 29-year-old Zac Mihajlovic from Camden, New South Wales, decided to build a real one for himself. He spent the past two years modelling a street legal version of the iconic batman car from the 1989 film starring Michael Keaton.

Zac is now the proud owner of Australia’s only working and registered replica of the 1989 Batmobile that can be legally driven on public roads. And although he has been offered a lot of money for it (a six figure sum, he says), the Batman fan plans to keep it and use it to make sick children happy. “It’s my absolute pride and joy,” he remarked. “I feel like if I do nothing else for the rest of my life, I’ll die happy.”

Zac was only five years old when he first watched Batman and his obsession began. “At the time, being a five-year-old kid, it scared me but I never forgot it. I just love Batman because he’s one of the only superheroes that don’t have powers so being able to connect to him on a human level is great.”

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Deporah Hornberger and Stephane Langelier, from Kendallville, Indiana, have an unusual hobby – collecting vintage hearses. The gothic couple have three well-maintained funeral coaches stowed away in their spacious garage – all are modified Cadillacs, two from 1949 and one from 1964.

Stephane, a talented artist and musician who runs a pipe organ service, explained that he has always loved hearses. He met Deporah, a local realtor, in a gothic-style bar in Washington D.C. 10 years ago, and they have been inseparable ever since. Among their many shared interests is a common love for hearses.

The couple are members of the ‘Just Hearse ‘N Around’ car club in Michigan, and participate in car shows around the country. Whenever they show off their cars in these parades, they make sure to dress up – Stephane wears a top hat, black jacket and black leather pants, and Deporah shows up in a red satin and black lace gown.

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You don’t really need to spend thousands of dollars on Swarovski crystals or hair extensions to give your car a neat makeover. An inexpensive Sharpie can do the job just as well, if you’re creative enough. Like this woman who used dozens of Sharpies and put in 100 hours of hard work to convert her husband’s 1995 Nissan Skyline GTR into a mind-blowing piece of art.

Collen Kelton, a US military officer stationed in Japan, had always hated the dull silver color of his R33 GTR. So he told his then-girlfriend Allison that she could doodle a few scratches on the bumper. But when he saw how beautiful her designs looked, he was compelled to ask her to keep going.

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StopXam is a vigilante group that is actively involved in fighting against the rude and entitled driving culture in Eastern Europe. Their goal is to stop bad driving with politeness, which forms the basis of the name StopXam (meaning ‘stop rudeness’). While the non-profit organisation originated in Moscow in 2010, several branches have emerged in neighboring countries such as Moldova.

With their unique approach towards eliminating illegal parking and dangerous driving, StopXam has managed to become an internet sensation. Their technique is simple: they first approach offending drivers and try explaining things politely. For instance, they might say: “Hello, your car is standing too close and does not allow this car to move. Please park somewhere else.”

Some drivers get the message quickly and correct themselves. But those who don’t get a giant sticker that covers up almost half their windshield. “We will give you a sticker on your front window, and it will be very uncomfortable for you to drive with it,” they warn. If the driver still doesn’t budge, they go ahead and paste the sticker, which reads: ‘I don’t care about other people, I park where I want’.

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We’ve seen people cover their cars with the weirdest stuff – right from dentures to swarovski crystals. But this one is a first – an Italian hairstylist chose to pay tribute to her profession by covering her car in human hair. There’s hair everywhere – on the exterior, the seats, the dashboard, and even the steering wheel.

The car in question belongs to 44-year-old Maria Lucia Mugno. She decided to cover it in hair in 2010, after a friend bet her that she couldn’t do it. So with the help of her assistant Valentino Stassano, she spent 150 hours sewing thickly braided strands of hair imported from India on her small Fiat 500. The effort won her the Guinness World Record title for the world’s hairiest car.

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This group of highly skilled Indonesian woodworkers caters exclusively to people who love collecting sports cars – both real and wooden. They carve impressive life-size replicas of popular sports car models, and their creations are routinely exported to buyers in the US, England, Germany, and other European countries. 

Their latest handiwork is a model of the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, made entirely out of teak – it doesn’t work of course, but it’s a stunning copy of the real thing. And let’s not forget – cheaper by several thousands of dollars.

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21-year-old Daria Radionova has been attracting a lot of attention on the streets of London with her swanky, crystal-encrusted car. The Russian student apparently wasn’t content with her Mercedes CLS 350; she wanted something more ‘unique and special’. So she spent £20,000 (a little over $30,000) to coat the luxury vehicle in a million Swarovski crystals.

The sparkly car is currently parked outside the Levin Hotel in Knightsbridge, in West London. The neighborhood is well-known for rich Arab kids speeding around in their garish supercars during the summer. Among the well known cars in the area are a gold Range Rover, and an assortment of Rolls Royces, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis. Daria had to do something different if she wanted her car to stand out, so she chose to cover every last inch of it with crystals, including the door handles.

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American designer Rex Rosenberg is the proud owner of ChewBaru, a truly one-of-a-kind car. Originally a bland Subaru the unique vehicle has been covered with over 70 pounds of dentures and another 70 pounds of partial dentures and impressions. Not to mention the assortment of empty toothpaste tubes, dental tools, mannequin heads, doll parts and dental-themed stickers.

According to Rex, the ChewBaru is an ‘art car’, one of only around 1,000 that are estimated to be running in the US. He had always been interested in art cars, following ‘art car stuff’ on the internet since the late 1990s. So when he bought his Subaru in 2005, he started thinking of what he was going to do with it.

“Several ideas came to me, and I even started pursuing some of them by getting some materials,” he said. “However, none of them really grabbed me. It was while going to sleep somewhere in western Nebraska while on the Route 6 Art Car Tour that the idea for the ChewBaru came into my head! The idea of dentures came to me. I knew then what I was going to do.”

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30-year-old Ismail Mescioglu, a bus driver from Turkey, had always wanted to drive his very own truck, but he knew he could never afford to buy one. So he settled for the next best thing – to build one using discarded parts and scrap metal. Today, Ismail Mescioglu is the proud owner of a swanky street-legal red truck he named ‘IMES’

Ismail, a father-of-two from Turkey’s Tusba county, is the first person in Turkey to have built a large-size truck entirely on his own. He managed to complete the seemingly impossible project through sheer grit – he had no prior experience, no proper plan and no idea of how he was going to pull it off. “When I started the construction, everyone was taunting me,” he said. “Everyone was making fun of me.”

But Ismail was not one to give up. He started visiting scrap dealers and gathered as many parts as he could. He also bought an old Murat 131 car for the motor. For the body of the truck, he bought metal sheets and built the entire body of the vehicle himself. After several months of hard work, his patience finally paid off and the truck was ready. and the most impressive thing is it only cost him around $2,800.

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A group of ‘manly men’ from small-town America are performing outrageous acts to display their contempt for environmentalists. The rednecks, as they don’t seem to mind addressing themselves, blatantly refuse to accept that climate change and global warming are real. So they’re jacking up their diesel trucks to intentionally emit huge clouds of toxic smoke into the air.

Dubbed ‘Rolling Coal’, the polluting trend involves the reconfiguration of vehicles to produce higher amounts of diesel exhaust. These modified trucks force extra fuel into the engine and feature smoke stacks through which they release giant dark clouds of black smoke. Their goal is to spread the polluting fumes into the air, or at other cars, and they don’t seem to mind spending thousands of dollars to do it.

While these modifications aren’t exactly new, the trend appears to have gained more momentum in recent years. These truck enthusiasts have taken to the internet to openly express their dislike of hybrid vehicles and other environmental causes. A whole new subculture now exists online; they’re getting together by the thousands on social networking websites, sharing photos and videos of their latest exploits.

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‘Only Girls’ is a new garage designed to make women feel comfortable, especially those who are tired of being shortchanged by deceitful mechanics. It recently opened in the Saint-Ouen-l’Aumone suburb of northwestern Paris.

The garage opened just a month ago and it has already had around 40 customers, two-thirds of which were women. The concept of an all-female garage stands to be a big hit because Only Girls aims to offer women motorists exactly what they need – respect. Many women claim to have a tough time getting their cars fixed at regular garages, because mechanics do not take women seriously and quote higher prices than they would for male customers.

“When you’re a woman, it’s like you’ve got ‘sucker’ tattooed on your forehead,” said Sandrine Hautenne, 42. “One time, I went round to three different garages, and got three different estimates. Since then, I’ve sent my uncle to get estimates and guess what? The prices have dropped!”

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The Microjoule is an extremely fuel efficient car that can travel over 2,000 miles on just a single liter of fuel. That sounds ridiculously unbelievable, but it’s true. The carbon fiber vehicle is built to accommodate just one person at a time, lying down, which is a weird way to travel, but who cares, when it covers a 200-mile journey for just 20 cents?

The Microjoule is the brainchild of a group of French students at the La Joliverie College in Nantes, western France. They built the superlight vehicle (35 kg) as a part of the 2003 Shell European Eco-Marathon Contest to find the world’s most fuel efficient vehicle. Needless to say, they won, beating 200 other teams competing in the event.

The judges at the contest tested the car on a track in Rotterdam, the Netherlands – they calculated that the car could do 2,072 miles (that’s 3,300 kilometers) per liter of fuel or 9,400 miles per gallon. Which means that driving the Microjoule once around the world would only cost about $26.

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Wu Deqi is the proud owner of a brand new swanky BMW. Nothing special so far, I know, but that’s because you don’t yet know how he got it. Instead of money, he had to pay for it with a lot of pain. In a promotional contest held last Sunday in the Shapingba District of Southwest China, Wu stood on one leg with one hand touching the coveted car alongside 20 other participants. After a grueling 7 hours and 26 minutes, Wu was the last man standing – automatically winning possession of the 300,000 yuan BMW X1.

Of course, Wu’s feat is nowhere near the Guinness World Record for standing on one leg. That distinction belongs to Suresh Joachim, who balanced himself on one foot for a whopping 76 hours and 40 minutes. But you have to hand it to Wu for his extraordinary effort. I mean, I couldn’t do it for over 5 minutes even if they offered me two BMWs.

The actual event began on 1 March and attracted hundreds of participants. About 140 people entered into three elimination rounds, and 20 shortlisted candidates made it to the final competition on Sunday. This last round was the toughest; some of the contestants actually dropped to the ground in agony. The competition began at 9:30 am and by 1:30 pm, the going got really tough. That’s when the organizers asked participants to stand on tip of their support foot. Flour was spread under each person’s foot to make sure they didn’t cheat and rest their heels.

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