There are dozens, if not hundreds, of groups on social media that share and discuss images of things in real life that appear Photoshopped or to be a “glitch in the Matrix.” The Facebook group “Like Photoshop, but with Welding” is a great place to find automotive oddities, but a car from a recent TikTok video may be the best so far this year. User @justinbuildcars came up with what he calls the “Lamando XL,” which is a near-ten-foot-wide Volkswagen Lamando with some interesting parts thrown in to achieve the look.
The Lamando is a Chinese-market car that slots into the lineup as a sleeker version of the country’s Jetta model, the Volkswagen Sagitar. It was never sold in an “XL” for any market, however, so this is a dramatic transformation.
Building a car like this as a pet project takes a tremendous amount of time and money or an extremely skilled hand in the garage. Justin’s build seems to have fallen somewhere between those two factors, as the quality looks pretty solid, but there are some sketchy bits as well. Rather than spring for an expensive custom glass windshield, the crew opted for a plexiglass piece to save money. The under-hood area also features some questionable construction, as the double-sized engine bay is half-empty.
We don’t hear much about the car’s actual functionality, and it appears to move slowly in each video shared so far. It’s impossible to deny the cool factor, though, and the fact that the car moves at all is impressive. There are also few visual indications that this is a bootleg build, at least from the outside, which is a feat in itself.
