Fast and very furious: inside Kim Jong-un’s sanctions-busting car collection

As catastrophic floods flattened hundreds of homes in the northern Pyongan province this summer, North Korea’s supreme leader paid his disaster-stricken subjects a visit, surveying the damage from his top-of-the-range Mercedes SUV.
Photos released by the hermit state’s media showed the Mercedes-Maybach GLS’s distinctive grille visible from inside Kim Jong-un’s private armoured train, from where he addressed evacuees.
Released late last year in the US and Europe for about £200,000, the vehicle exudes “sophistication with its unrivalled elegance”, according to its maker.
The North Korean leader’s car is almost certainly more expensive, though, with the price inflated by armoured plating, bullet-proof glass and other optional security features — along with the cost of getting around UN sanctions.
Under UN resolutions, first enacted when Pyongyang carried out underground nuclear tests in 2006, exports of luxury cars and other high-end items to North Korea are banned.
This has not deterred the Swiss-educated despot. In 2019, the journey of two luxury Mercedes believed to have been destined for Kim was traced from Rotterdam to Osaka, Japan and through to Busan, South Korea. From there, a ship carrying them was due to travel to a Russian port but never arrived and later returned to South Korea.
President Putin of Russia, seemingly aware of Kim’s penchant for high-end rides, presented him with a Russian-built Aurus on his visit to Moscow in February, and a different model on the return visit to Pyongyang in June. The two were smiling broadly as Putin drove Kim around in video that seemed to show a blossoming bromance between the increasingly isolated authoritarian leaders.
Kim was previously spotted in a Rolls-Royce Phantom in the run-up to a meeting with Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state at the time, in Pyongyang in 2018. In April, he appeared to use a fifth-generation Cadillac Escalade SUV to arrive at a missile test inspection. He is also thought to own Lexus limousines and a Lexus armoured sedan.
In a country where 60 per cent of the population is estimated to live in poverty, luxury tastes among elites are not restricted to cars or to its supreme leader. Kim is reported to be a cognac connoisseur with a particular preference for Hennessy, while his sister Kim Yo-jong and daughter Ju-ae have both been pictured sporting Christian Dior.
Both Kim and his wife, Ri Sol-ju, have been spotted wearing Movado Swiss watches, while Kim is also partial to Patek Philippe and IWC timepieces.