This Nitrogen-Filled Facility Keeps Supercars Factory-Fresh Indefinitely

To keep any car as pristine as possible, it will need to be stored in the best conditions when it's not being used. For most car enthusiasts, that might mean adding some upgrades to their garage for more year-round comfort to spend time on maintenance and repairs. For wealthy supercar collectors, it might mean something very different.

For starters, most wealthy collectors aren't going to be spending time working on their own cars — they'll simply have a team of people do that for them. They also might choose to store their cars in a specialist facility, to ensure that they don't have to worry about temperature fluctuations or excess humidity causing damage to any fragile components. A few choose to take things to the extreme, and store their cars in a location where they don't even have to worry about oxygen.

SSR Performance in Munich, Germany, has built a unique underground facility which keeps cars in a storage space filled with nitrogen, and YouTuber Mr JWW was given the lowdown on exactly how it works. He explained that air is removed from the facility and nitrogen is pumped in, which means there is no oxygen present to cause degradation in rubber or other perishable car components. It also means there's no risk of cars catching fire, and since humans require specialist breathing equipment in order to enter the facility, it acts as a theft deterrent too.

The nitrogen storage facility is sealed off from the rest of the building, with cars only being able to enter and exit thanks to a series of car-transporting robots, a bit like those in Tokyo Drift. These robots can carefully pick a car up and transport it to its designated spot within the facility, then when it's time to return it to its owner, complete the process in reverse without a human ever having to touch the car.

Keeping cars in this way allows owners to preserve them in as-new condition in a way that simply wouldn't be possible otherwise. It houses both fragile classics and new cars, with SSR Performance's representative explaining to the YouTuber that some of the new cars in storage have never actually seen daylight. Their owners had them delivered straight from the factory in a closed trailer, offloaded in SSR's workshop on the ground floor of the building, then transported straight into the underground nitrogen storage facility.

These unused cars still need to be maintained periodically, but the team has a system for that too. Using the robot transporters, the cars are retrieved from storage and taken back up to SSR's workshop when they need an oil change or any other maintenance. Technicians from the supercar manufacturer can then travel to SSR's workshop, carry out the necessary work, and leave the car to be returned to the facility, all without it ever needing to leave the building.

SSR's representative told Mr JWW that maintenance teams for the facility's infrastructure were the only people that needed to enter, assuming they had the correct breathing equipment, adding that a human trying to enter without that equipment would pass out within a minute or two. Aside from that, the entire three-storey facility was filled only with collectors' cars, robots, and an awful lot of nitrogen. At the time of filming, he added that there were over 140 cars sitting in the chambers.

It's a more extreme setup than even most dedicated supercar storage facilities, and it's entirely unobtainable for anyone who's looking to safely store their beloved classic car in their own garage. Nonetheless, for enthusiasts with both the desire and the funds to store their car as securely as possible, it surely doesn't get much safer than keeping it underground in a nitrogen chamber.