With the line between renderings and reality getting thinner and thinner these days—will.i.am’s G63-faced AMG one-off coupe brings a recent example—a Dubai showroom pulled a neat social media trick earlier this week. The high-end vehicle specialist introduced a video apparently filmed in its showroom, which added a CGI vehicle lift bringing a rare Lamborghini to the “surface”.
Mixing what appears to be actual showroom floor footage with the said pixel stunt makes the short video irresistible. So, the clip became a hit on Instagram, not least thanks to being shared by Supercar Blondie.
VIP Motors UAE, the dealer in question, did thank vertex cgi, the digital label behind the work, in its post, thus hinting towards the pixel-augmented nature of the vid (this is the first clip below).
This part of the message got diluted in the said vlogger’s post, since (to use her real name) Alexandra Mary Hirschi only added a hashtag lining the work to its creator. However, Russian vlogger Alan Enileev, a former Need for Speed world champion, who is in charge of the said digital label, did take to the comments section of Hirschi’s post, praising the vertex artists for the shenanigan.
As such, there were quite a few enthusiasts who took the clip for granted, fueling the fantasy of a United Arab Emirates showroom that brings Italian exotics from the depths of its underground storage like it’s nothing.
The Veneno Roadster in the rendering is as real as they get
In the defense of those who though the whole thing was business as usual at the dealership, the Lamborghini Veneno Roadster, one of just nine ever built, that’s being hauled by the lift is real. And, as the company explains in an Instagram comment, it only has 60 miles (100 km) on the odo.
You can see the Sant’Agata Bolognese machine in the second video below (as well as in the image gallery), which brings a realistic take on how things look in the Middle East’s supercar capital city. Nevertheless, given the amount of horsepower and dollars per square inch delivered by the sea of luxury and exotic cars, the clip still seems surreal.
The V12 hypercar is currently up for grabs, but the price is only available on demand. And that’s probably because the rare V12 hypercar started at $4.5 million when brand new, with another example that was sold for $8.3 million back in 2019 becoming the most expensive Raging Bull to be auctioned by that time.
The vertical car handling idea has been around for six decades
Returning to the supercar lift stunt, positioning the vehicles vertically would most likely cause issues with the fuel and the various fluids, even though the idea has been around since the 1960s. That’s when General Motors and Southern Pacific Railroad introduced a vertical loading system for transporting the Chevrolet Vega and its Pontiac Astre counterpart across the country cheaper and safer.
The custom-design autorack was dubbed Vert-A-Pac. It was as large as a regular 89-foot flat car sporting a three-level autorack, but, instead of 18 vehicles, it could carry 40. Thus, it cut transport costs by up to 40%.
However, the vehicles, which were topped up with fluids from the factory as normal, were engineered with safeguards against fluid spillage and chassis/powertrain friction damage, with certain protection measured being removed prior to the delivery—you’ll find a presentation of the system in the retro footage below, with this showing how the railcars’ loading doors were closed using forklifts.
