Mercedes-Benz G63, Takashi Murakami Flowers

Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo in 1962. In 2000 he set out his Superflat theory in the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name that he curated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and in 2001 his production workshop, the Hiropon Factory, became Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. Smiling flowers are one of the motifs that run through his work. The car beneath the pattern is the Mercedes-AMG G 63, which has used a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 since the second-generation G-Class of 2018. The G-Class itself has been built in Graz since 1979, and the 500,000th example was completed in April 2023.

Here the whole body is covered in smiling flowers in every colour, with wide-eyed cartoon faces across the doors and rear quarters, and a large red and white flower filling the spare-wheel cover on the tailgate. The roof is white. Against the pattern, the grille with its vertical slats and the AMG plates front and rear are in black, and black multi-spoke wheels show red brake callipers, with chrome running boards and twin side exhausts below the doors. A card printed with the same flowers and the AMG logo lies on the carbon-pattern base. It is built at 1:18.