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Here's an unusual one, which will surely provoke a load of 'the sky's the limit' gags in onlookers - BMW has created a unique M850i with bits of meteorite incorporated in the cabin, which is called the Individual Night Sky.
Created by BMW's Individual Manufaktur department in Garching, outside Munich, the M850i Night Sky features various buttons, dials and switches which are finished in applications of meteoritic material that has fallen to Earth. The timing of BMW's reveal of the M850i Night Sky, by the way, was to coincide with our planet travelling through the orbit of asteroid 2003 EH, which was due to create an intense meteor shower in the night skies on January 3 and 4.
It's not just extra-terrestrial fragments of rock which BMW has incorporated into the M850i Night Sky to make it feel truly celestial, as there are also illuminated constellations of stars on the centre console and in the surface designs of the Eight's trim finishers, seat backrests, brake discs and some of the exterior additions.
But back to the meteoritic rock. It's on the whole of the centre console's trim plate, the start-stop button for the M850i's 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8, the selector lever for the eight-speed Steptronic transmission and the controller for the iDrive system. Inlays made from meteorite material have also been incorporated into the door sill finishers, together with an illuminated model badge.
Anything else?
In designing the BMW M850i Night Sky, BMW Individual sought out the expertise of researchers at the Max Planck Institure for Extraterrestrial Physics, which is helpfully located in Garching. That has led to a number of features which display the Widmanstätten surface pattern of meteorites - that is to say, a geometric structure, with straight lines, which has the appearance of ice crystals and which only becomes visible when certain types of iron meteorite are polished or brought into contact with acidic compounds.