Articles by Iain Kelly

What's the most expensive car in the world? Well, we often think of the latest hypercars as the pinnacle of automobiles, and the manufacturers have turned to releasing eye-wateringly expensive limited-editions like the Koenigsegg Trevita ($6.7 million). However, modern cars don't hold a candle to classics when it comes to the most expensive car ever sold.

If you want to get your hands on a car that was never sold new in Australia by the manufacturer, there is only one way to get it: you have to import it.

One of the biggest cinematic franchises of the last two decades, the Fast and Furious movies loosely follow the wacky japes of a crew of former street racers as they have slowly transition into international anti-terrorist action heroes. Where once it was all about punk kids not liking the tuna and closing off roads for pizza boys to find another way home, these days it is all secret agency tac-op

A key part of “celebrity life” is having a garage heaving with expensive, exotic cars to maintain that image of wealth and success. Sports stars, musicians, actors, fashion designers and others in the glitterarti have plenty of pesos in the bank to fund a lavish lifestyle, and a few of them have spent their hard-earned building seriously cool collections of cars.

It's a sad fact that we Aussies miss out on a tonne of killer cars that were sold in other parts of the world, and the spread of the Internet has made it easier to learn about rare and unique vehicles from all over this vast blue planet.

The cars many V8 enthusiasts hold up being responsible for kicking the recent muscle car war into high gear is Dodge’s SRT Hellcat range. First shown in August 2014, the Hellcat badge represented a high-performance variant of the SRT Challenger and Charger muscle cars, along with the Jeep Cherokee Trackhawk, which joined the line-up in 2018.Producing a monstrous 527kW (707hp) from a 6.2-litre Hemi V8 wearing a fat 2.3-litre twin-rotor intercooled supercharger, the Hellcats were the most powerful Chrysler production vehicles ever built and the most powerful muscle cars of all time until Chrysler brought out the race-tuned 626kW (840hp) Demon sibling in 2018.While Chrysler has enjoyed a resurgence in Australia over the last decade, we missed out on the go-fast Challenger and Charger models as these platforms are not built in right-hand-drive format. We did get a limited number of Jeep Trackhawk models, but for some people a 2.4-tonne SUV is the antithesis of a proper muscle car.The supercharged Hemi models started at US$60,990 (nearly $87,000 Aussie pesos) at their launch, but the Dodge Hellcat price was well over $200,000 once they’d been imported to Australia and put through a rigorous compliance programme. The cost of this work ran into the tens of thousands of dollars and, with their rarity and popularity, this drove local prices up.While Chrysler caught Ford and General Motors napping off the line, both manufacturers have hit back with their own bombastic muscle cars packing over 485kW (650hp) and plenty of flat-out racing smarts like variable-ratio oil pumps, intercooled superchargers, and magnetic ride control dampers. The Shelby GT500 Mustang and Camaro ZL1-1LE both showed Hellcats a clean set of heels around race tracks as the Hellcats cannot get away from their heavy, ponderous underpinnings that date back to 2005!Although many tag 2020 as the era of Tesla and electric vehicles, the positive reviews from media and owners pushed Dodge to keep developing the big supercharged V8 Hellcats to include the monstrous limited-edition 626kW (840hp) Demon model (which can run the quarter-mile in single-digit times!), the Jeep Trackhawk SUV, and the new “Redeye” Hellcat models which use some of the parts from the Demon to produce a staggering 594kW (797hp).Dodge saw fit to equip the Redeye with wider guards and bigger wheels and tyres for more grip, upgraded differential and axles, as well as the Demon’s huge 2.7-litre supercharger that pushes more boosted air into the 6.2-litre V8. All that work means the SRT Hellcat Redeye edition is the fastest production muscle car ever produced, and this makes it incredibly sought-after.All Demons have been sold, though there are already a handful in Australia for sale for anywhere between $300,000 and $400,000 as they’re considered to be modern classics. Hellcat Redeye models have started coming into Aussie shores, though these should price between a normal Challenger and a Demon as they start at almost US$71,000 in their homeland (before any expensive compliance work has to take place).Thanks to Australia’s import laws, the best chance to own a Hellcat model is to buy one second-hand which has been imported into Australia and properly converted to right-hand drive by an authorised workshop. Any import car should have paperwork showing the import procedure was properly done, and the car had a legitimate title in the USA.The Hellcats seem to be fairly reliable, though there are plenty which have been crashed as drivers can struggle to control over 700hp so it might pay to check the VIN (the car’s unique identity number) on the American CarFAX service to see if there had been any insurance claims or accident history in its past. 

There is no magic car scratch remover tool, but car scratch and dent repair can be simpler than you may first imagine.

Pagani’s Zonda heralded a new era in the European hypercar, and the follow-up retained many of the signatures that made the Zonda such a knock-out success: a demonic Mercedes-AMG V12, drama-filled looks, lashings of carbon-fibre, and exemplary dynamics.

Ferrari’s top-dog 12-cylinder models have always commanded an exclusive, exotic place in the pantheon of cars, and they are surely the pride of Italy. In 1984 the new F110 model “Testarossa” debuted, featuring a mid-mounted 390hp (287kW) Tipo 113B flat-12 engine to keep weight low in the wide-set chassis.

What is a kit car?A kit car is a type of vehicle either built at home or in a small workshop using components sourced from other vehicles, and are often designed to look like a fancier, more expensive vehicle.At one point in Australia’s motoring history the kit car industry was a booming business. Beginning in post-war years, handy people who weren’t prepared to get grimy scrounging wrecking yards to build a hot rod could order a set of plans, or parts in kit form, to build a vehicle at home.The Lotus 7 was thought to be among the first cars sold in kit form, as a way of cheapening the cost of buying the vehicle and avoiding delays in having Lotus assemble a running, driving car. The popularity of the 7 led to a whole class of clubman vehicles that are all about home-built super-lightweight fun.Kit cars in Australia back in the day would see punters order the bare bones parts of the vehicle, sometimes including the chassis and body, which would be supplied unfinished. These DIY handymen would then find the drivetrain from popular makes and models.For those not so talented on the tools, a kit car can be more of a custom vehicle based off a cheap, commonly available donor like the Toyota Celica or Volkswagen Beetle, with a modified body fitted on top. These were often offered as a drive-in, drive-out customisation for client’s existing vehicles by companies like Adelaide’s Creative Cars.Creative Cars sold kits to turn a Beetle into a Porsche 911 lookalike called the Poraga and Porerra, or a Celica dressed as a Ferrari 308 called the Cerino, among others. The latter was initially known as the Ferrino, until Ferrari objected to the name. These weren’t cheap, with the Poraga conversion costing $10,000 back in the mid-1980s!However, the kit car industry was impacted as road rules were created to control the types of cars allowed on Australian roads. While it was OK in the 1950s for anyone to put whatever engine into another type of chassis and fit their own, home-made body on top, by the early 1980s we had federal laws setting a minimum standard for cars being brought into Australia to be sold as road cars (Australian Design Rules), and then we had ever-tightening state-based laws controlling what modifications were permitted for road-going vehicles.By the late 1980s kit cars were mostly sold as replicas of rare 1960s exotic cars like the Ford GT40, Shelby Cobra and Ferrari 250 GTO. Sometimes these cars could be ordered as a turn-key car, or a DIY kit to be built at home to the owner’s exact specifications. However as road regulations tightened through the 1990s, the cost of gaining registration approval for road use skyrocketed to over $300,000 per-car (depending on the state the vehicle needed to be registered in).These costs came as the vehicle had to be built to the same standards as a modern car, which is incredibly difficult in a vehicle built at home to replicate a 1960s car, and then approved by a registered engineering signatory who had a process of inspecting and testing the vehicle. As laws are fluid and constantly changing, many kit cars end up unfinished as owners find it difficult to navigate a highly complex and expensive process. This is why kit cars are all but extinct now in Australia.The good news is there are many ways to build a kit car today, if you have plenty of dollars in the bank and can set aside several years to step through the whole process. For this reason, many people choose to customise their car in a more traditional hot rod-style, rather than building a complete vehicle from the ground-up.Today you can buy car body kits online for a variety of budgets. Among the most popular are the Japanese “Rocket Bunny Pandem” kits from TRA Kyoto’s Kei Miura. Featuring fat, 80s-style rivet-on boxed wide-body guards, deep front bumper extensions, and his trademark duck-tail spoiler, they end a massively aggressive race flair to otherwise common sports cars.Talk to any late-model tuner car enthusiast and they’ll tell you the hottest cars in their scene are Toyota 86 Rocket Bunny, S14 Rocket Bunny Silvia, S15 Rocket Bunny Silvia, an RX-7 Rocket Bunny, or a 350Z Rocket Bunny. They rarely look anything like the original car and could almost be considered a kit car, especially with the popularity of power-adders like the many Toyota 86 turbo kits on offer.For those who are feeling really adventurous there is the Vaydor, which is a drastic restyling of a core Nissan/Infiniti G35 Skyline. There is no firm confirmation if the Vaydor G35 is a road legal kit cars in Australia, so don’t spend your pennies there without doing a lot of research first.The booming market is in electric car kit swaps, where a petrol or diesel drivetrain is replaced with an electric one. Again, legalities concerning these modifications aren’t super-well-understood yet but this is a potential area to keep an eye on if you want a silent-running car but can’t afford a Tesla, or don’t want to give up your favourite ride.