I was a big fan of the movie Aliens, and the Armored Personel Carrier, despite its simplistic design, was a favorite of mine. The Batmobile has a very similar armored feel, except it has more complex structures. I read an article that indicated the design is based on a hybrid combo of a Lamborghini and a Humvee, and indeed you can see traces of both.

What about the kit? Bandai did a pretty good job with the details of the model, replicating the multitude of pistons and textured armor plates. The kit is basically snap-fit, except you need glue for a few pistons.

The engineering of the kit is very good. The new batmobile is made of about 6 different pieces of armor overlaid on top of each other, and the fit of these pieces are tight. The kit comes with 6 rubber tires (the giant backwheels are 2 pieces each), 2 clear pieces and probaby around 70-80 pieces.

Despite the great stuff, I was also a bit disappointed in a number of things... first, the kit is too small. The perspective shown in the box art made you feel this is a big kit, but basically the batmobile is smaller than an SUV, and a 1/35 SUV is a small vehicle.

I'm also disappoint that at about 3000 yen, the kit didn't include lighting. The batmobile is much cooler with lights! I thought about installing them, but since the kit is so small, I'd rather build a larger one and install lights on it.

Also in spite of all the great extenal details, Bandai, the maker of Master Grade kits that has good internal details, pretty much ignored the internal details of this car. You have two seats and that's it. Well given the dark windows you can basically see nothing inside via the windows, but you can imagine a detailed kit with openable doors and stuff. I guess we'll have to wait for that.

I drybrushed this guy with Mr. Metal Color Aluminum. It's a very strange color, because it's basically a podwer when it dries, which is great for drybrushing. At the small scale I opted for a very large contrast, with heavy drybrushing on the edges. It works good on the real model, but looks a bit exaggerated in the photos. I also lightly dusted the tires with grey to bring out the details.

The most challenging part of the car is to install the 4 "stablizers" on top-back part of the car. These very uniquely designed stablizers were supported by 16 pairs of golden pistons, each stablizer has 3 points of contact, you pretty much want to just go with superglue on these points and be done with it. Each point of contact is on a different model kit piece, so you'll need to be somewhat precise in putting these pieces together.

An ariel view, you can see these stablizers interleaving. I haven't seen the movie yet so I don't know what exact purpose they serve, besides looking unique...

The damn car is so full of pistons even on the armor surface!

If you have the kit, you'll notice that I installed the front wheels in reverse... the patterns on the front tires are supposed to go the other way. I discovered it after all the drybrushing works, and didn't want to rub them off... and frankly I can care less :)
However, following the instructions is pretty important for this kit, because the armor pieces have to be installed in a certain order, or else they won't go in. Learned it the hard way :(

The giant "springs" on the back suspension is just plastic, but it looks pretty realistic after painting. The gold rim around the thruster requires a bit of care in painting.

Top view from the back. The stablizers ("dude, get over it already" :D) look a bit like bat wings from this view. But the antennae at the ends are a bit goofy...

From this angle you can really see the outline of a Lamborghini, no? Also I forget to mention that the wheels don't really turn, so you want to buy the toy version if that's you thing :)