People are regularly taking to Reddit to ask about this or that strange vehicle and to talk about odd cars.
Which is interesting because some of those cars are actually pretty mainstream.
Then again, it’s all relative and probably depends on your level of ‘car nerdiness’.
Although, to be fair, some of the vehicles Redditors have been photographing are truly unrecognizable.
These are only considered odd cars if you haven’t seen Fast & Furious
We’ll begin with a car that all Fast & Furious fan will have recognized.
This is a Toyota Supra with a similar bodykit and livery to the one used by Paul Walker in the first Fast & Furious movie.
It’s heavily modified, but the trapezoid headlights are unmistakable.
A one-off vehicle tested by Jay Leno
Moving on we’ve got Jay Leno (yep, that’s Jay Leno at the wheel) driving the Blastolene Special, or ‘Tank Car’ as some people call it.
Built as a one-off in Oregon in 2001, this is a huge roadster with a 29-liter (!) V12.
Power? Unclear, but most sources quote 1,600 horsepower, the same as a Bugatti W16 Mistral.
One of the most analog supercars in the world
Then we’ve got a car that’s telling us what it is, the Gordon Murray Automotive T.50.
After designing cars for others, British-South African designer Gordon Murray finally built his own brand.
One of the first cars he built was this: the T.50. It’s a V12-powered supercar with 654 horsepower, no turbos, and a manual gearbox.
Just like a Mercedes CLK… sort of
Another car that appears quite often is Mercedes that looks both familiar and unfamiliar.
It looks familiar because it’s based on the Mercedes CLK, but it’s unfamiliar because it’s the GTR version, built as a homologation model for the equivalent FIA GT Championship race car.
One of those odd cars that’s not where you think it’s from
Another interesting find is this Eastern Bloc-looking car. It looks like something built in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, but it’s actually a Dutch car from the 1960s and 1970s called DAF 33.
Built apparently from the scratch, the car had its own chassis, its own flat twin engine and even its own gearbox. And it’s not rare, either.
Over 130,000 units were produced.
This is (almost) a Lotus Elise
Another Redditor spotted a strange-looking Lotus that sort of looks like an Elise.
And that’s because it is.
This is the Lotus 340R, a track-ready sports car based on the Elise.
It uses the same engine and chassis, but it has a custom built bodyshell with no roof or doors.
Only 340 were built, and they were actually sold before production even started.
Bonus round: unrecognizable odd cars in London
There’s an iconic photograph taken in London at some point probably in the 1960s that features a car no one can recognize.
At one point, a reader got in touch with Supercar Blondie, swearing that was a Saab Sonett II.
A couple of years later, another reader got in touch with us again, swearing that is definitely not a Saab, and others pointed out this must be a Sunbeam Alpine, an obscure British-made sports car.
Either way, there’s no definitive proof.
So the mystery continues.
