British artist creates unique x-ray art of iconic cars

These images show iconic cars as you’ve never seen them before – in x-ray form.

British artist Nick Veasey, 55, spent five years using the biggest x-ray machine in the world – nearly 100 times more powerful than a hospital x-ray – to scan the multi-million pound vintage supercars.

Nick was inspired to take on the project after pulling apart a £175 British Mini and x-raying every part at his studio in Maidstone, Kent, six years ago.

He persuaded a dozen private car collectors to lend him their vintage vehicles and has spent the last four summers scanning them at the huge, state-of-the-art “XXXL” facility in The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, painstakingly spending a month putting each set of scans together to create prints of a total of 20 cars.

The exercise cost Nick “more than a month’s salary” to hire the use of the 20mx20mx20m room to spend a day x-raying each car.

Each vehicle was very carefully hoisted on to a turntable at a height of 1.2m with a crane within a futuristic chamber lined with 4m-thick walls of dense sand.

MORE: Pictures of the week: Jellyfish, journalists and jogging
MORE: Scientists find huge cave on the moon which ‘could house a lunar colony’

The nine-million volt scans were taken at 0.2mm height increments to reveal how the world’s greatest car designs evolved during the 20th century.

“To get the project to work I had to find a way of x-raying these very valuable cars without messing around with them because they are valuable,” Nick said.

He added: “You’ve got to love the car initially but also when you really do a forensic inspection of these vehicles there’s so much to discover as the x-ray reveals everything.”

All of the car owners joined Nick to watch their cars get x-rayed.

Nick said: “My work is like an internal journey inside the car, it has integrity, it shows what it is like inside, it’s another way of enjoying these fantastic machines.”

Not all of his subjects were supercars – Nick even included the humble Citroen C2, adding: “I was trying to create images of not just the simply valuable cars.

“One was the Citroen C2, it’s iconic, you look at that car and you smile and the same with the Fiat 500.”

He played down his unique form of art which he has honed since 1999, saying: “I’m just interpreting, using the same (x-ray) technology but in a more artistic way.”