Last year, a physical Elon Musk-signed Tesla Model X toy car was minted as a non-fungible token (NFT). It was then put up for auction on OpenSea. The auction didn’t turn out to be very successful, but this caused some car fans to become curious. They now wonder if NFTs will get into the automotive market someday.
Well, it’s safe to say, NFTs have entered this market and garnered extensive media attention. But how exactly do automakers take advantage of the accelerating trend? Read on to find out.
Chevrolet And NFTs
Chevrolet is the one of the latest big names in the automobile industry to enter the NFT marketplace. Chevy (as the carmaker is informally known) announced that the company is auctioning off a Corvette NFT “Own The Color” on NFT auction site SuperRare. This they intend to do in collaboration with artist Nick Sullo. The NFT features a Minted Green 2023 Corvette Z06 car accelerating in a cyberpunk backdrop.
The auction was initially planned to be held from June 20, 2022, to June 24, 2022, but Chevrolet later extended the auction period because some users expressed disappointment about missing the Corvette Z06 NFT artwork auction window. The real-life 2023 Corvette Z06 is expected to be mass-produced in mid-summer 2022 and will be formally put on sale in early 2023.
Although it’s unclear who’s getting the NFT, the winning bidder will not only receive the crypto artwork but more. The winning bidder will also win the physical, first and only Minted Green 2023 Corvette Z06. Chevrolet confirms that the Minted Green color won’t be applied to other Z06s in future production. This move makes the auctioned car one-of-a-kind. All proceeds from the auction will be donated to the educational charity DonorsChoose.
More Luxury Automobile Companies
Italian luxury automaker Lamborghini revealed its first NFT project in January this year. The automobile giant will not be left out in the NFTs world.
Entitled “Space Time Memory”, the NFT collection contains five pairs of linked digital and physical art. These arts were created in collaboration with Switzerland-based artist Fabian Ofner, NFT Pro and RM Sotheby’s. The space-themed digital artwork portrays a Lamborghini breaking down into its core components after traveling through the atmosphere and enter space like a rocket.
Unlike Chevrolet’s NFT, Lamborghini didn’t offer a physical luxury car for buyers to claim. Instead, winning bidders received a physical “Space Key” made of carbon fibers that Lamborghini sent to the International Space Station as a part of a research project back in 2019.
Each Space Key is a gray rectangular block onto which a QR code linking to the digital artwork is engraved. To match the astronomical theme, Lamborghini planned to hold every auction for 75 hours and 50 minutes. This move matches the exact time it took Apollo 11 to leave Earth and enter the moon’s orbit.
Ferrari In The NFTs Scene
Premium sports car manufacturer Ferrari partnered with Swiss technology company Velas Network AG last year. Their mission was to put its first-ever NFT on the market. The company announced plans to make the NFTs available for purchase in March 2022. This was when a new F1 game season began. However, as March came and went, we didn’t hear anything further from the company about the project details. Neither did we hear about the exact date when the project will officially take flight.
While the project is still in progress, Ferrari’s official website was hacked several months after announcing its NFT plan. Ferrari’s subdomain “forms.ferrari.com” was reported to be compromised on May 5 to support an NFT scam. The scammers devised a malicious program named “Mint Your Ferrari” and used “a collection of 4,458 horsepower NFTs on the Ethereum network.”
This they did as tactics to prompt people to purchase.