It takes serious money to amass a car collection. The big names—Ralph Lauren, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld—first made fortunes worth hundreds of millions of dollars before turning to the auction houses and dealerships with hungry eyes. Others, like Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan al Nahyan, known as “The Rainbow Sheikh,” inherit their wealth. Since the late Seventies, he’s used his share of that country’s oil money to build what must be the world’s strangest car collection. It’s stashed in a warehouse in the middle of the Arabian Desert, and the cars that make up the so-called Emirates National Auto Museum are rare, numerous, well-kept, but above all: bizarre.
Case in point: Have you ever seen a five-story, 100,000-pound Dodge Powerwagon?
It’s literally the size of a house. The tires are from an oil rig, the wipers from an ocean liner, and the tailgate, when lowered, serves as a patio. (There’s a matching, building-sized Jeep, too.) The giant truck was born out of the Rainbow Sheikh’s nostalgia for Abu Dhabi’s oil boom of the Fifties, when the Powerwagon was one of the few cars that could hack the desert. Sizing down we find a W116 Mercedes S-Class monster truck, then the requisite Lamborghini LM002, then a bevy of G-Wagons, Land Rovers, and Toyota Land Cruisers. Those are just the trucks.
