You think you know big?
Look down.
Or rather, look way down. That thing towering over the desert sand is the Dhabiyan. Technically it’s a 10.8-metre-long SUV, if you squint at the definition until your eyes hurt. The guts come from a Caterpillar 15.2-liter diesel, spitting out 600 hp of brute force. The bottom half is an Oshkosh M-1075 Army truck. The top? A Jeep Wrangler.
It has headlights ripped from a Ford F-Series Super Duty. The tail lights are from a Dodge Dart. Why? Because Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan said so.
They call him the Rainbow Sheikh. Not for the sky above the Emirates. He once paid to carve canals spelling his name into an island off Abu Dhabi.
His net worth sits around $20 billion.
You’d expect a hangar of Ferraris. You’d expect Pagani Zondas parked in a climate-controlled row of pristine boredom.
There are none here.
The Emirates National Auto Museum doesn’t do rare. It doesn’t do clean. It does strange. It is an archive of automotive chaos. 1980s tuner culture meets royal whimsy. And frankly, it’s much more interesting for it.
The Desert Oddities
The museum itself hides behind a pyramid, an hour out from central Abu Dhabi. The road there is just endless straight asphalt cutting through the heat haze.
You know you’ve made it when you see the giant.
First, there’s the Land Rover. It’s a replica Series III so large it makes a Nissan Patrol look like a toy. It doesn’t drive. It just sits. Intimidating.
Next to it? A Jeep.
Actually, a Willys. Twenty-one feet tall. Four times the size of the real thing. Guinness certified. You can actually drive it, from a cockpit hidden behind the grille if you’re tall enough to reach. An axe is bolted to the side. A shovel, too. Ready for what exactly?
The collection proves that scale isn’t everything. Personality matters.
The Rainbow Sheikh likes things obscure.
A Mercedes W116 sedan, converted into a monster truck, waits at the gate. It was built to roam. It hasn’t moved in years.
Chrome and Chaos
Inside, the theme shifts. Less military hardware, more vanity.
Take the R107 SL.
On a standard model, chrome shines. Here? Gold. Plated. Every single part. It has flag ports for parades. It screams “I paid a lot for this.”
There are no supercars.
There are Styling Garage projects. There are weird body kits that belong to a decade where fiberglass ruled supreme.
The place is messy. It feels like someone broke into a factory and kept whatever looked weird.
Which is exactly the point.
It’s not a temple to engineering perfection. It’s a playground. And the gate is still open.
Who’s to say what comes next?
