One of the best things about this reality we live in is that there seems to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of air-cooled Volkswagen-based strange vehicles, and they get doled out into my brain based on some arcane formula I can only guess at. I happened to be made aware of some new very obscure VW-based vehicles, and I wanted to make sure I share them with you, because that’s the unspoken agreement we have. This time I’d like to talk about three very similar machines, the Trailmaker, Terra and the Mactra — all built in New Zealand around the 1960s and all filling a niche that VW never quite managed to really crack.
The niche in question is small, rugged utility vehicles — something even smaller and cruder than VW’s own Type 2 pickup trucks, and something that I think mainstream VW came closest to with the VW Thing, which was marketed more as a fun vehicle than a real work vehicle.
The Thing, also known as the Type 181, was originally commissioned as a military vehicle, and really can be thought of as a development of the WWII-era Kubëlwagen. While there were military versions made, the way the Thing/181 was usually positioned was as a fun, do-anything sort of machine, as you can see in this brochure:
Some of us, though, don’t get to bop around all day in the sun with out surfboards getting rich, deep tans. Some of us have to work. And for those people, well, at least those people in Mexico, VW did offer a variant of the 181 designed for more truck-like duties:
This machine, called the Safari Pick-Up, was not really a huge seller, but there was definitely a market for this sort of machine. In Australia, VW of Australia took matters into its own engineers’ and designers’ hands and built, at least until VW HQ made them stop because they were introducing the Thing/181, the Country Buggy:
Clearly, there’s a place for small workhorse vehicles about the size of a Beetle, because the concept keeps coming up. They must be especially desired in Oceania, considering that Australia developed their own indigenous version and New Zealand did as well, three times!
Incredibly, there’s one on Bring A Trailer right now, a Mactra:
This one has been lowered and modified a bit, but you can get a good sense of what these machines were like from looking at it. In a word, they were pretty crude. Well, crude but clever. They used body panels that mostly avoided difficult compound curves or complex stampings, and packaged a very usable truck quite nicely on the stock VW chassis.
(pictures: Bring a Trailer)
There’s a sort front trunk there – or there could be, I imagine originally these would use the stock VW fuel tank as the floor of the trunk instead of the fancy chrome gas keg we see here in this one from Bring A Trailer. Because the bed is fairly high to clear the engine, as you can see above (the engine access cover is removed), there’s also a nice storage locker under the bed and just ahead of the rear axle, similar to what you’d find in a Type 2 pickup.
(pictures: Bring a Trailer)
There were a lot of variants of these, and this one may be a Terra – I’m honestly not sure. Terras were made in the city of Rotorua, and it’s said about 450 were built, which is a pretty large number, considering. Demand for these was decent because imported trucks were extremely expensive in New Zealand at the time, and Beetles built in VW’s Australian factory were cheaper and easier to come by, and then convert into workhorse trucks like these.
(pictures: Bring a Trailer)
That seems to be a picture of the Mactra factory, in the collection of the person selling the Mactra on BaT, and even there you can see some body differences from the others we’ve seen.
This is the Trailmaker, and there seem to have been about 96 of these built, by Cambridge Panel Works:
(image: Wheelerdealer.de)
So, $950 in New Zealand in 1965 would come to about $23,855 New Zealand dollars today, which is about $14,808 in US Freedombucks, so that’s a pretty good price for a truck! And it carries six sheep!
(images: Start Me Up FB page)
There ares some other Trailmakers from the Start Me Up Facebook page, which also seems to have made a TV episode about the car, though they call it a 1955 there and I’m pretty sure this is from 1965, since most other sources have the company starting production then.
The Trailmaker design seemed to use bed sides that angled outward, and I don’t think they used the under-bed storage locker.
(images: Start Me Up FB page)
I have to be honest again here, I’m not sure which of the local companies made this one, but it has a number of body differences from the others we’ve seen.
I really appreciate how a small country like New Zealand was able to find such a clever solution for their need for small farm trucks, taking the resources they had (VW chassis, sheet metal, grit or moxie or whatever) and making something that was practical and useful and filled the niche no one else could.
Anyway, if anyone here buys the one on BaT, let me know!
Cool, but hard pass.
TIL that sheep are a standard unit of measurement down in the land of kiwis and hobbits.
Wait, an entire article about Beetle-based pick up trucks without a single mention of the Fusck Up? Who are you and what have you done with Torch?
These were made with Number 8 fencing wire. Kiwis will know what this means…
Man, I love the protean nature of the basic Beetle platform. Economy car? Sure. Minivan? Yup. Truck? Several variants. Roadster? Sports car? Dune buggy? Poor man’s jeep? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
That lowered Mactra is the perfect example of when to not lower a vehicle. All the things they did ruined what the Mactra was good for, utility. Can’t put much of anything in the bed, can’t go on unimproved roads either.
Also doesn’t improve on the looks, which was likely what they were going for here. I’m not one to judge other people’s taste in cars, but lowering just doesn’t work well aesthetically for any kind of pick-up truck in my opinion.
I secretly liked the mini-truck phenomenon in California in the 80’s. Slammed Datsun and Toyota pickups with wild paint schemes were awesome.
Hey, it’s better than the Carolina Squat.
Almost anything is better than the Carolina squat. Even ridiculously unpractical negative camber looks less silly. I will concede that small japanese pick-up trucks are an exception, they do look nice slammed.
Sweet as, little truck.
Aw man, it’s like the reverse of when a woman in a 90s movie takes off her glasses and suddenly becomes hot. The orange version is full of scruffy-dog glory, charm and quirk and utility, and the post-customized example just looks like a wish.com Fridolin.
Man…I REALLY like that Terra. There’s something very pleasing about that one…the proportions are better, I think, than the Mactra for sale. I can totally see how useful that would be on a farm. Maybe I need to get one…
Give a kiwi a shed and magical things will materialize.
Hard-working farm truck by day, prom limo by night!
Wow, and I thought Lucy Lawless was the best thing to come out of New Zealand (sorry Peter Jackson)! Gonna have to add these little beauties to the Meyers Manx as some of my favorite VW adaptations. My best friend in high school drove a bright orange Type 181. For Halloween, he’d decorate it like an evil Jack O’ Lantern. We called it the Spooky Thing. Scared the mud out of little trick or treaters, well the ones without eggs anyway.
What about the Trekka? Not VW-based, but around the same era and with similar Kiwi philosophies. Knowing about these does help put the Trekka into context instead of it seeming like some random flash-in-the-pan creation.
Thanks for mentioning the Trekka, I’d never heard of it and it’s definitely an interesting story and a cool little car. I wouldn’t have guessed Skoda was in business with a manufacturer in New Zealand right in the middle of Cold War. For all the talk of how the Eastern bloc was almost hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world, there sure seem to be lots of intersting stories of bilateral economic cooperation.