Great balls of fire and other goodness graced Dogpatch's warehouse district on Saturday, when an art car rally flamed on from the afternoon into the evening with more than a dozen pyrotechnically enhanced mutant vehicles, a who's-who of Burning Man circuit DJs, and a few thousand not-yet-dust-covered Burners holding court for the Wild Kingdom Art Car and Fire Festival. SFist was on hand to get these pictures and video as the Midway SF and its surrounding streets were transformed into Fury Roads.

One of the more iconic art cars was the Dusty Rhino, seen above getting hot and horny to the delight of the LED-clad crowd. But there's more to Dusty Rhino's mission than just shooting fire and shaking booties, as it so capably has at last year's Warriors championship parade and previous SF Pride Parades.

“We donate to help save rhinos in Africa,” said Dusty Rhino’s Peter ‘Rhino Daddy’ Sheridan. ”There’s an organization called Rhino Without Borders. We donate to them and they airlift rhinos from certain areas of Africa to others where there’s less poaching.”

Air was also lifted by the fire-breathing mutant squirrel car Bassnut, seen driving people nuts in the video above. Bassnut was parked alongside the similarly-rhinocerous-inspired Rhino Redemption (below) and the blazing bumblebee Apis Inlusio seen at the top of this article.

“The Apis Inlusio is a giant, stylized, fierce, whimsical bumblebee vehicle,” said Aaron Cutchin, one of the lead builders of this blazing bee car with giant LED-panels eyeballs and flame-throwing antenna. “40 people or so dove into it and started working on it on nights and weekends for about six months. Most of my camp are attorneys and professionals. Some had never picked up a drill in their lives.”

“I love all the 40-year-old sexy butts at this party,” Mr. Cutchin added parenthetically.

The distinction of being the first-ever inflatable mutant vehicle to hit the Playa belongs to The Air Pusher, the steampunk zeppelin parked at Saturday’s proceedings. “Whenever you’re the first at something, there might actually be a really valid reason no one did it,” said Edmund of the Air Pusher Collective, citing the playa’s propensity for 75-mile-per-hour windstorms.

Winds aren’t the only problem the Air Pusher has encountered. “In the dance music scene, there’s a term called ‘Drop the Bass’,” Air Pusher Captain J. Austin Gregory told SFist. “You drop the bass and boom, everyone goes crazy. So we had a ‘drop the bass’ moment on Air Pusher and we dropped the bass literally. Our subwoofers fell off the bottom of the car and started rolling away across the playa. We literally dropped the bass and had to turn around the car and go pick up out subwoofers again.”

The celebrated Unimog also turnt up Saturday, as the converted 1973 Mercedes Unimog 404 radio truck that started the DJ art car craze delivered its signature 16,000 watts of audio assault. The Space Cowboys’ Unimog is credited as Burning Man’s first megawatt mobile sound system, and has been responsible for many of the festival’s most enduring moments.

“It was 2000, the first year there was a Temple burn,” Space Cowboy Shizzy told SFist. “Larry Harvey and David Best reached out to us and said, ‘Can you bring this sound system thing you have out to the Temple?’ We had an opera singer on top of the Mog, and she crushes it. To have 25-30,000 people all in this circle, to have this moment of respect where no one is saying anything, to me that was the Mog’s greatest shining moment ever.”

For art car builders, those shining moments are constantly offset by operational and mechanical catastrophes. “It’s a labor of love and then it eventually turns into a labor of resentment,” said Jason "Horse" Anderholm, proprietor of the steel horse car Chester seen shooting flames above. “If I had any advice to anyone who sees all this fun with art cars? Don’t do it. If you have a teeny-tiny bit of common sense in your head, talk to the people who own, finance, maintain, and build art cars. Then you’ll find out what you’re really into.”

“I’ve spent a hundred thousand fuckin’ dollars on this thing. Twice," Anderholm said.

If you missed Saturday and have any burning regrets, Chester and many of the art cars seen above will fire up again at Precompression this coming Saturday at Oakland’s American Steel Studios.

Related: Jumbo 747 Definitely Going to Burning Man This Year

Dusty Rhino, image: Joe Kukura