Anyone who wants to experience a real Batmobile no longer needs to go to Gotham City. There is a functional replica running through the streets of Hanoi in North Vietnam. Its owner, a young fan of the Dark Knight, has already invested more than 10 months and more than $ 20,000 in the project.
Like most young people in the world, Nguyen Dac Chung, a 23-year-old architecture student, has always dreamed of driving his own Tumbler, a Batmobile prototype created by Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) in the 2008 Christopher Nolan film.
Last year, Nguyen decided it was time to make his dream a reality, and took 500 million Vietnamese dongs (about $22,000 USD) to build his exclusive full-size and fully functional Tumbler. Despite being only 90% completed, the car has attracted attention on the street, and stood out in the media.
The homemade Batmobile is powered by a 400 cc four-cylinder engine and can reach a top speed of 62 mph. The suspension system consists of four front and two rear shock absorbers, and the car’s spoiler can be controlled using a pneumatic system.
As this prototype was not developed in the Applied Sciences Division of Wayne Companies, Dac Chung’s vehicle does not use the famous jet engine exhaust, although it maintains the original iconic shape, but with the propulsion of a motorcycle exhaust.
The interior of the North Vietnamese Batmobile still leaves a little to be desired, although it has enough space to comfortably accommodate two people. Nguyen Dac Chung recognizes that there is still a lot of work to do, to the inside of the vehicle, mainly in lighting, but expresses that his car is still under construction.
The majority of parts used to build this Batmobile are manufactured in North Vietnam, but some components had to be imported from the United States and South Korea, for example, the tires.
To finance the construction of the Batmobile, Dac Chung is a businessman who runs his own cosplay production company in Hanoi. Apparently, he will have to work extra hours to finance some of the remaining elements, like freezing machine rays and exclusive ballistic missile launchers.
