18 ridiculous things made by car companies that aren’t cars

Car companies. They don’t only make cars. In fact, in the case of Jaguar, they don’t even make cars, at least not at the moment. Auto makers also can’t help themselves but dabble in non-auto-related ventures, with varying degrees of success and tastefulness.

We’re not talking about mere merch here, when a manufacturer slaps its logo on a keyring, or baseball cap, or bathrobe. We’re talking about the truly weird stuff: the submarines, the skyscrapers, the actual islands.

So, henceforthwith and without further ado, we present most unusual Things Made By Car Companies That Aren’t Cars And Also Aren’t Just Merch (Apart From Some Bits Of Merch We Threw In At The End Because They’re Funny). Onwards!

After a tough day whanging their Bolide around their private racetrack within their private volcano lair, what self-respecting Bugatti owner wants to slump down on a regular bed made by some regular run-of-the-mill bedmaker? No self-respecting Bugatti owner, that’s who.

Clearly they would prefer to slip their immaculately moisturised and expensively maintained body between the sheets of an official Bugatti bed, one "inspired by the ocean’s fluid energy, defined by lightness, motion, and Bugatti’s iconic detailing". Which we think is a fancy way of saying ‘is quite blue’.

Yes, everyone’s favourite Merc-fixated tuner this year announced it was starting work on a 100,000-square-metre island in Abu Dhabi. Upon this island, Brabus plans to build 350 apartments and 100 villas, which it shall furnish to match the "striking, progressive brand character of Brabus". Yep, there’s gonna be carbon fibre toilets.

Seeing out one’s days on this planet on an island built as a temple of worship to Brabus, surrounded by hundreds of fellow highly-monied German tuning enthusiasts? Whether this sounds like your idea of heaven or hell reveals, we suspect, a great deal about you as a person.

Since 2013, BMW has developed carbon fibre bobsleds for the US Olympic bobsled team. This is (a) maybe somewhat unpatriotic from both BMW and US Olympic bobsled team, but also (b) very cool.

Apparently the BMW bob can reach speed in excess of 90mph, which is admittedly slowly than the XM. Then again, the sled also doesn’t boast a terrible face that makes small children cry, so let’s call it one-all.

In recent years, Hyundai has done a fine job of injecting genuine performance credentials into its once-staid car line-up, in the shape of machines like the i30N and Ioniq 5N.

This revolution, it seems, has not yet reached Hyundai’s supertanker division, where the focus seems to remain very much on practicality over performance.

The Hyundai Brave, for example, measures 334 metres in length, and can carry 8,500 shipping containers, which is even more than you can fit in the latest Skoda Superb estate. However, despite packing a 109,000bhp engine, the Brave tops out at a sluggish 31mph. Give that ship an N mode, Hyundai!

To date, Ferrari has created two theme parks, a production run it would presumably refer to as ‘super-exclusive’. There’s Ferrari Land in Spain, while in Abu Dhabi you’ll find Ferrari World, home to the world’s fastest roller coaster.

Unveiled in 2010, Formula Rosso accelerates from zero to 149mph in under five seconds, making it even quicker off the line than a Rimac Nevera. The best thing about this experience is that you will be accelerating too fast to see the awful array of Prancing Horse tat on sale around the park.

It costs five million pounds, which is 100 times the price of a Civic Type R. It’ll do 486mph, which is just under three times the top speed of a Civic Type R. Conclusion: on a performance-per-pound basis, Honda car beats Honda plane.

On the other hand, you can’t eat peanuts in your Civic Type R while surveying the world below from an altitude of 47,000 feet. Not unless something’s gone terribly, terribly wrong.

In 2020, as the Covid 19 pandemic swept the globe, GM speedily repurposed its factories in Indiana, switching on a dime from building cars to building ventilators. In just five months, the General managed to churn out some 30,000 ventilators, likely saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the process. We don’t have any jokes about this one. It’s just great.

Yep, that Lexus hoverboard from a few years back wasn’t the work of CGI. It was real. OK, so it was an absolute pig to ride, and OK, it required a magnetic track, and also required a top-up of liquid nitrogen every 20 minutes. But hey, the LFA required refuelling roughly as often, and you didn’t hear us complaining about that.

Sadly Lexus never put its hoverboard on general sale, perhaps concluding that the knees and ankles of the average Lexus buyer wouldn’t withstand repeated tumbles into a concrete half-pipe. 

When Porsche released the Cayenne back in 2002, the puce-faced purists were up in arms that a company famed for low, light sports cars would dare to build something so tall and heavy.

How do those puce-faced purists feel about Porsche’s recent forays into the world of residential tower blocks, creating structures in Stuttgart, Miami and Bangkok? At least these high-rise protrusions make the Cayenne look low-slung and featherweight by comparison, right?

Porsche says its towers combine "characteristic features of the brand", specifically "functional design, technical innovation and forward-looking technologies". Sure, but you could do all that with a Porsche toaster, guys. Won’t someone think of the poor puce-faced purists?

This isn’t some tenuous brand tie-up, where a car company simply sticks its logo on a totally unrelated product. Oh no. Peugeot’s adventures in spice-grinding actually predate its adventures in car-building, dating back to the 1840s.

Until the new e-208 GTI arrives, this inanimate wooden grinder is perhaps the spiciest thing in the Peugeot line-up.

It started out as an Elon Musk joke tweet, because doesn’t everything seem to these days? After hilariously punning that he’d overdone it on the fictional spirit ‘Teslaquilla’, everyone’s favourite pot-stirring plutocrat decided to make his chucklesome creation a reality.

Unfortunately Mexico – the large country in central America – told Musk he couldn’t call it Teslaquila, what with tequila being a protected word. So Tesla Tequila it became. Why not store yours in an official $215 Tesla decanter, a vessel every bit as classy as the Cybertruck? Don’t drink and drive, kids.

Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg facility is the largest car plant in the world, with a footprint three times the size of Monaco, and building some half a million vehicles a year.

It’s also an absolute sausage factory, producing some eight million official VW currywurst each year. Part 199 398 500 A is manufactured in two sizes (12.5cm and 25cm), with a fat content of just 20 per cent, which is apparently unusually low for a bratwurst. It’s a superleggera sausage!

Just like the ID.3, the VW sausage features no usable climate control buttons.

In 2017, Aston Martin unveiled a new ‘state-of-the-art submersible’, produced in collaboration with Triton Submarines. The sub, codenamed Project Neptune, offered a top speed of around five knots, which is very slow by car standards, but apparently quite rapid by the standards of underwater millionairemobiles.

Aston claimed the sub would allow it to "to further enhance and grow the brand into new aspects of the luxury world". Those new aspects being, presumably, ‘the bottom of the sea’.

Since 1977, Toyota has constructed prefabricated housing in Japan and Indonesia.

They don’t appear to be especially exciting houses, but then again the Corolla isn’t an especially exciting car, and that hasn’t stopped Toyota selling billions of those.

OK, we promised not to feature merch. But come on. Ferrari offers a poker set for the low low price of £4,700, and you needed to know about this, right? According to Ferrari, the kit arrives in a carbon-fibre-coated box, and boasts "unique custom details that distinguish it as a genuine display piece and collector’s item". We’ll be the judge of that, thank you very much.

£4,700 might sound a lot, but it’s only the same price as speccing the engine cover of your 296 GTB in carbon fibre. That hasn’t softened your mood, has it?

For more than a decade, Bentley has been making smells. Established in 2013, Bentley Fragrances has been offering what it describes as "a new olfactory experience and expression of luxury".

Its latest fragrance, BEFORE, apparently "evokes a spirit of fearless exploration, beckons the bold and encourages you to seize life’s every moment and take a step towards embracing your true essence". We’d have been happy with ‘makes you smell less awful after the gym’, but you do you, Bentley.

Once again, we really didn’t want to feature merch. But then this extraordinary kids’ buggy popped up on our Instagram, and we couldn’t resist. Resist poking fun at it, we mean. Resisting buying it was very straightforward.

Bentley simply calls this bequilted creation ‘the 6-in-1 trike’. The Incontinental GT, lads! The name was staring you right in the face!

Copy nothing! Delete ordinary! Meaty chunks! Time to end the list!