Chen’s snaps from a recent trip to Thailand have opened my eyes to amazing custom cars and even wilder garage designs.
Larry Chen is one of the biggest automotive photographers, and as we’ve written before, a darn proud Asian American. He mostly loves drift and tuner-style cars but his portfolio is deep. Naturally, his Instagram feed is always a dizzying carousel of amazing machines he finds worldwide. Still, his recent batch of casual shots from a trip to Thailand caught me by surprise—there are cars and collections down there that blew my mind to see, even on my little iPhone Mini screen.
I’ve never been to Thailand, but one of the few things I know about the Asian nation is that it’s one of those places with super-high import taxes on cars. Based on that I would have guessed you’d mostly find two types of cars roaming the roads: The cheapest, base-model vehicles maybe being used for commercial purposes, and boring bone-stock luxury vehicles owned by the ultra-rich.
There might be a lot of that, but Chen’s IG feed for the last few days has opened my eyes to some unique custom car builds and private collections. So much so that I felt compelled to help disseminate it to those who don’t already follow him on that particular social channel.
Get a load of this Heng’s Garage place. Parts of it look like the coolest antique store ever, and other corners look like a dang airport terminal decorated by a car nut:
Heng’s Garage has its own YouTube channel too, and shared a related video:
Then there’s this place “Hikki Hut” which appears to be an entire urban residence with an old-school JDM theme:
Then we get a video tour of another spot just filled to the brim with car-themed and automotive-adjacent treasures:
@larry_chen_foto/Instagram
Hang on, now we’re going out into the streets, where there’s a dang 650-horsepower taxi. Looks like you can find the owner on Instagram too @zentrady_lb (they’ve got some great pics in their feed too). Meanwhile, you can peek at the car here:
@larry_chen_foto/Instagram
Then there’s this … tuner ambulance on TE37s. The driver is ID’d as @tanawat_sax (also with their own IG) and the build is incredible. Would this even be legal in the U.S? I don’t know, but I love it:
By comparison, Oak Club Thailand looks like a relatively “familiar” tuner shop, but this Spoon Sports-shaped three-wheeler was so wacky I had to share it. Looks like Big Bird just got hit in the face with a cartoon water balloon:
@larry_chen_foto/Instagram
This is just a small taste of the stuff Chen has dropped as I write this. I’m not gonna say you need to create an IG account just to get a better look at these (especially since I’m sure Chen will share more highly produced images and videos from this trip on other platforms soon). But even as a lifetime car nut who spends way too much time scrolling car pics, this recent batch of uploads really blew my mind.
I’ll just leave you with one more, perhaps the wackiest—what I can only describe as “cowboy Santa driving a grocery cart:”
@larry_chen_foto/Instagram
Looks like I need to book a Thailand trip to try and see some of this scene myself!
