Why stop at slapping a couple of ‘70s-style faux wood panels on the sides of your ride when you could be driving a car or motorcycle that’s made entirely from wood? Though it’s an unlikely material for this purpose, these 12 modes of transportation are made primarily from trees, including a Vespa, a three-seater bike, a floating Ferrari and a race car.

Toyota Setsuna Concept Vehicle

Nearly every part of the Setsuna Roadster unveiled by Toyota at Milan Design Week 2016 is made of wood, with different varieties selected for different practical applications. 86 handmade panels of Japanese cedar make up the body, while birch was selected for the chassis and smooth castor aralia for the seats. Traditional Japanese joinery techniques like ‘okuriari’ and ‘kusabi’ are put to work so the pieces fit together without nails or screws.

“When we created the sestina, we envisaged a family pouring its love into it over generations so that the car gains an irreplaceable value. Continuous development is possible in the form of bonds between the car and the family, like the growth rings of a tree. To proceed with the development of a car utilizing the appeal of wood, we directly spoke with experts with wide-ranging knowledge, including carpenters specializing in temple and shine construction and ship’s carpenters.”

Three-Seater Wooden Motorcycle

A Hungarian carpenter made this three-seater custom motorcycle entirely from pine, with handlebars made from the horns of Hungarian grey cattle. It’s fully functional and built around a ZIL 200cc engine and took six months to build. Despite the level of craftsmanship put into this rig, it’s built more for looks and reliability than for speed, topping out at 12 miles per hour.

Homemade Floating Wooden Ferrari

Made completely out of pine, this replica of a Ferrari F50 is actually a boat. Artist Livio de Marchi wanted a Ferrari to call his own, but needed something more practical to get him around the canals of his home city of Venice, Italy – so this was his compromise. Completed in 2001, it’s been owned by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! since 2009.

Half & Half Wood Car

Half retro convertible, half modern Cadillac, this bizarre wooden car made by Ukrainian Vasily Lazarenko is built on a chassis and engine from a 1981 Opel model with a 100 HP engine. It’s not registered, but seems like it would be street legal. The custom creation went up for sale on eBay in 2012 for $120,000, though it’s unclear whether anyone ever bought it.

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Wood Could 12 Unlikely Timber Transportation Designs

With their streamlined silhouettes, exposed mechanical parts, high-end detailing and powerful motors, these 15 modern motorcycle designs represent a new era of aesthetics in the industry, even when they’re customs built on the bases of classic bikes.

Akrapovic Full Moon

Looking unlike any motorcycle we’ve ever seen on the streets, the Akrapovic Full Moon motorcycle concept features a massive 30-inch aluminum and carbon front wheel and a sculpted, aerodynamic metal sheet frame that envelops the rear wheel. Hydraulic suspension keeps the bike upright when it’s parked, and automated steering keeps the handlebars looking sleek.

BMW Apollo Streamliner

A combination of traditional styling and futuristic looks keeps this concept by industrial designer Mehmet Doruk Erdem firmly rooted within the BMW brand, while bringing it into this century and beyond. Designed for speed rather than everyday use, the Apollo Streamliner features a pointed front end to reduce wind drag on the rider.

Rectilinear T005 Cross

In contrast to the sleeker curvilinear designs, the Thrive Motorcycle T005 Cross goes for a chunky rectilinear look. The whole thing is actually a modified 1984 Yamaha – the designers stripped it down, fitted it with off-road tires and added a custom body made of sheet aluminum, updated for the modern era with a smartphone slot.

Bandit9 Bishop

Another custom modification takes a Honda Supersport and transforms it into a minimalist design enthusiast’s dream, with wood burl side panels contrasting with the steel unibody. Bandit9 released only nine models of this bike, with a 90cc or 125cc engine.

Bandit9 Eve

Bandit9 also used a 1967 Honda SS bike as the basis of a custom design, pairing it with fashions from Konstantin Kofta in this editorial for a futuristic effect. The bullet-like chrome-finished unibody puts the focus on the exposed mechanical parts.

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Modern Motorcycles 15 Super Sleek Custom Rides

Before the abandoned railroad tracks of Paris officially disappear – which is bound to happen, as cities realize the potential for reclamation as High Line-style parks – some intrepid locals are taking the opportunity to explore. “Train Project” by French design studio HeHe is a series of fun, quirky handmade vehicles that traverse the city on a line that most local residents never get to experience firsthand.

The autonomous vehicles include ‘Metronome’ and ‘M-Blem,’ two transparent, cylindrical solar-powered electric vehicles, and the sailboat-inspired ‘Radeau de Sauvetage.’ HeHe also developed additional vehicles made for train tracks in other cities, like an individual transport system to transfer objects from one place to another in Slovakia, and a one-person platform making use of the urban tracks in Istanbul.

HeHe calls The Train Project “an ongoing body of speculative investigation into the language and aesthetics of transport culture,” proposing personal rail travel as “a temporary, imaginative solution to question our industrialized conscience in relation to locomotion.”

The collective invited members of the public to travel on the vehicles, “journeying through space and time to experience the past and future of local transportation networks.” The idea is to take a picturesque trip through areas of the city that can’t be seen from the roads, reclaiming spaces that have been left to deteriorate until they’re inevitably integrated back into the functional urban landscape.

A similar project (above) explored sections of the 5,500-plus miles of abandoned railroad tracks in Mexico with the retro-futuristic SEFT-1, modeled after a midcentury vision of a spaceship.

Japanese tea houses spring from the roofs of ordinary-looking trucks, ornate handcrafted cabins are tacked onto school buses and fire trucks are converted into monster off-road RVs when industrious and determined DIYers decide to take on building their own mobile homes. One tiny house on wheels even has a back deck with a full-sized hot tub, and an incredibly fun two-story Victorian house on wheels makes its way around the desert.

The Neverwas Haul: A Steampunk Mobile Home

RVs rarely get more ornate than this – a two-story Victorian house on wheels, designed, naturally, for Burning Man. The Neverwas Haul was built over six months in 2006 and is made almost entirely of recycled materials. Designer and builder Shannon O’Hare used the skills and experience he gained creating theme park structures around the country to come up with this amazing vehicle, which is built upon the base of a fifth wheel travel trailer.

Tiny House with a Built-In Hot Tub

You can even tack a generously sized wooden hot tub – powered by wood, if you like! – onto the back of your very own custom-built tiny house. UK-based Tiny Wood Homes builds both hot tubs and little houses on wheels, making this combo a natural fit. The whole setup is small enough to be towed around via truck and sells for about $57,000.

Matthew Hofmann’s Renovated Airstream Trailers

Architect Matthew Hofmann purchases old Airstream trailers and renovates them into beautiful and modern mobile spaces, custom-creating everything from backyard offices to tiny roaming homes. The project began when Hofmann decided to downsize from a large house to an Airstream of his own. People took notice and soon enough, demand turned into a business opportunity.

Wothahellizat

Sound out the name of this creation phonetically – that’s basically the reaction of everyone who sees it. Australian photographer Rob Gray wanted a home base while adventuring in the Australian wilderness, so he created his very own monster RV complete with a viewing deck, hydraulically operated roof and a bedroom over the cab. It’s got all the amenities of a standard camper, but can go off-road.

Al’s Housetruck

What looks like no more than a narrow cabin from the back is revealed to be an incredibly intricate hand-crafted mobile home, built right onto the back of an old Dodge bus. Featured in the 1979 book Rolling Homes by Jane Lidz, ‘Al’s Housetruck‘ has a sleeping loft over the cab, a wood stove, stained glass windows and decorative porch railings.

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Roaming Homes 15 Diy Rvs Converted Buses Tiny Houses

Four wheels fixed onto an ordinary wood pallet have transformed it into a skateboard of sorts that can slide down tram tracks in Bratislava, Slovakia. The rails in the city happen to be just the right width to fit a standard Europallet perfectly, turning the humble warehouse staple into a personal vehicle.

While the streetcar systems of many cities run on wider ‘broad gauge’ tracks, Bratislava is among those with a one-meter width. Other cities where the pallet tram hack would work include Antwerp, Basel, Belgrade, Bern, Frankfurt, Helsinki and Zurich. Watch it in action at Vimeo.

Slovakian artist Tomas Moravec says of his project, “A new transport vehicle brings change into the spatial perspective of a passenger in motion and generally changes the life of the city, through which the pallet can run, guided by a map of the city lines.”

Where pallets were once used just a couple times and then thrown away, now they’re reclaimed for all sorts of projects, often requiring very little modification. Check out 13 DIY pallet projects for porch swings, home theaters and garden trellises, as well as 19 more clever pallet creations.