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Someone is going to pay a lot of money for Banksy’s SWAT van

Street art for cruising through the streets

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If you’re on the hunt for some new wheels and trolling through carsales.com is getting you nowhere on that search for your own Scooby-Doo van then we might have found the perfect thing. A US police SWAT van is up for sale at Bonhams in London for a comfortable $440,000. As far as whips go, this one hasn’t been driven for quite some time, mostly owing to the fact that the elusive artist Banksy has made it his own.

The van was shown in Banksy’s Barely Legal show back when he first debuted in the US a decade ago. Of course, that’s hardly the most memorable thing to have happened 10 years ago, but we doubt you need us to keep refreshing you on that. The actual event was attended by the likes of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Dennis Hopper, and Cameron Diaz. Not to mention the elephant in the room, where Banksy literally had an elephant in the room that no one was allowed to talk about. As in an actual elephant painted to look like wallpaper that represented the global poverty that no one is talking about. It doesn’t really get more Banksy than that.

On one side, the body of the van features an iconic shot of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz in a flush of graffiti and tags—talk about vandalism. Yep, there’s no place like the shame cube after a terrible pun. As we digress, the other side of the car’s body shows a little boy on the verge of pranking a SWAT team. We also can’t leave out the bumper sticker which instead of asking “how’s my driving?” begs the question “how’s my bombing?”

In the lead up to its auction on June 29, the van will be displayed in a courtyard outside Bonhams central London headquarters, marking the first time it’s up for display since the original show. We’re not really sure who is actually going to buy the thing but we can at least be sure that whoever it is will probably attract a more shocking reaction on the roads than P plates on a Ferrari.

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