Crowdfunding is the new way for creative and engineering types without access to traditional funding to get their projects off the ground. From a RoboCop statue in Detroit to actual hoverboards, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter can result in some truly innovative and interesting projects, and more than a few of them just happen to be car related.
One such project is Carros de Cuba, or Cars of Cuba, a coffee table book project being pursued by decorated car photographer Piotr Degler. He’s a little less than halfway to his $32,000 goal of publishing a book based on his 2015 calendar of the same subject. He spent a month in the island nation, taking more than 25,000 photographs of various vehicles, but able to showcase just 12 in his annual calendar.
If he can raise enough money via Kickstarter though, many more pictures of various classic cars in Cuba will finally surface. Perhaps the most famous picture from the 2015 Carros de Cuba calendar was that of a long-abandoned Mercedes 300SL gullwing coupe. While a few other images, including a teeny-tiny BMW Isetta and several American classics, will be featured in both the book and calendar, there’s so many other vehicles Degler hopes to showcase.
Like most Kickstarters, Degler’s offers several levels of donation, starting at 25 euros for a postcard featuring the aforementioned gullwing Mercedes. For 50 euro, you will get a signed copy of the Carros de Cuba book, featuring 200 photographs spread out over 300 pages with text in both English and Spanish. That’s one thick coffee table book. There are also other donation levels, all the way up to 4000 euro that includes a massive, signed art print of same desolate Mercedes, among other things.
We’re always looking for interesting projects, though they don’t always took the shape of your typical project car. If the cars of Cuba have long held a special place in your fantasy garage, you might consider plunking down for an early Christmas present to yourself.