Let’s Give The Cover Star Of The ‘Worst Cars’ Book The Makeover It Deserves

I’m embarrassed by a few of the industry awards my design company has won. There’s nothing wrong with the accolades themselves; it’s just the way we achieved them. No, we didn’t pay anybody off or blackmail them with their internet history. We won for a simple reason: no one else entered in the category.

The items that we were honored for were, at least in the opinion of yours truly who designed them, worthy of the praise – but with only one entry in the group, you could just as easily say they were the worst product as well as the best.

I can’t help but think of the Amphicar in a similar way. As the cover star of the ill-informed World’s Worst Cars book (which Jason is systematically setting right), the little amphibious machine must be considered to be among the best of its type if only for its singularity. And honestly, if you can drive an amphibious car to the water, float around for a bit without getting your socks wet, then drive home, you’ve got yourself a pretty great amphi-car, if not an Amphicar. The Amphicar didn’t last more than a few years, and charming as capable as it is in its original form,  I want to revisit, improve, and imagine how it could have lived on to greater critical and sales success.

Despite being German-designed and built, the Amphicar was powered by a Triumph-sourced inline four mounted in back; a lever next to the gear change allowed you to engage the twin propellors once you drove into the water. The front wheels acted as rudders, and by “acted” I mean acted in the same way that Tommy Wiseau did in The Room. Secondary latches on the side doors sealed them shut for water use (and probably just so nobody accidentally opened them).

The Amphicar company was part of the Quant group, an industrial conglomerate oddly enough run by Nazi Joseph Goebbels’ stepson named Harald Quant (the best man at Quant’s mother’s remarriage to Goebbels was a guy named Adolf Hitler). The family holdings included large stakes in the German auto industry with nearly ten percent of Daimler-Benz and thirty percent of BMW. Amphicar was hardly a huge chunk of Quant’s business, but he was apparently a big fan of amphibious transportation and this little car that he built. Few shared this vision, and when Quant was killed in a 1967 plane crash it completely spelled the end of Amphicar.

In hindsight, the Amphicar was the sweet spot of usefulness between its rather crude predecessors and overblown successors in the world of car/boat hybrids. I’ll show you what I mean.

Too Much Boat Or Too Much Car

While production numbers of Amphicar were indeed impressive, they pale in comparison to the 14,276 Volkswagen Schwimmwagens built by the Germans during World War II twenty years before. The Schwimmwagen was essentially a floating version of the flat-four powered VW Jeep called the Kubelwagen that was briefly sold here as the VW Thing.

A propeller could drop down in back to power it in water, but that prop was hooked directly to the crankshaft so it only spun in one direction. Want to go in reverse? Volkswagen recommended either engaging the wheels and spinning them backwards to provide some rearward motivation in the water or, better yet, use the paddles conveniently clipped to the side of the Schwimmwagen. Look, this wasn’t a consumer product and it sure as shit wasn’t recreational. As a simple, functional tool it supposedly could go virtually anywhere the tanks could on land, and naturally over rivers and lakes that they couldn’t. Still, as daily transportation? Forget it.

With amphibious cars built after the Amphicar, the issue didn’t seem to be crudeness: it was needless complexity. In the nineties and even early 2000s there were several firms making modern car/boat combinations such as the Gibbs Aquada.  These things reportedly could drive at rather high speeds on the road and travel at Jet Ski-like velocities on the water, feats that were rather unheard of in an Amphicar.

As you’d expect, the Aquada was quite expensive and production ceased after an unknown number were built (reportedly well under 100). Similar creations also failed in the market. Besides the high cost, there’s a fatal flaw with the Aquada others like it: they weren’t Real Cars.

Here’s the question you have to ask about a vehicle: could you, without checking the weather forecast any time of the year, hop into it wearing business casual clothes and drive to a work meeting 100 miles away and back today? If your machine can’t do that, there’s nothing wrong with it, but in my book it can’t be considered a Real Car. It might be a fun toy or even a purpose-built work machine perhaps, but not a Real Car. Complain about my categorization if you must, but I guarantee one thing: if it isn’t a Real Car, it won’t sell in any kind of justifiable numbers.

An Amphicar could do the tasks I just listed above. It might not do it as quickly as most modern cars, but complete the mission it could. The Aquada didn’t even have any fucking doors; forget leaving your backpack and computer in it. How’s your mom supposed to get in that thing? If you have to talk about “weather protection” in a six-figure price vehicle, expect bankruptcy proceedings once the hoopla dies down.

The Amphicar was actually rather affordable at the time; supposedly the price started at around $2800 while a non-floating boat like a new Impala SS convertible started at around $3100. While it couldn’t rival Corvettes on the street and a high-powered Chris Craft out on the lake, guess what? People didn’t care. Having a car that could keep up with traffic and also allow you to just mess around a bit in the water on a nice day with the flick of a switch was more important than pure speed. Also, it beats having to own a giant car to tow your boat to the lake from the spot in your driveway where it takes up space under a tarp for ninety-eight percent of the year (and often refuses to start since it’s been sitting all winter).

If someone had taken the Amphicar and improved on the formula during the mid-sixties, I bet we’d be seeing amphibious cars everywhere today. Here’s how that could have happened.

Rub A Dub Dub A Vee Dub In A Tub?

Exactly what company would choose to take the Amphicar ball and run with it?  I have to believe that it’s the same conglomerate that today owns a dozen different car and truck brands among its 342 subsidiary companies: Volkswagen. In the sixties, VW started this expansion with its acquisition of both the Auto Union group and struggling NSU; companies with front-drive technologies that would be instrumental in VW’s second act of the seventies. One could imagine a visionary in Wolfsburg seeing the viability of the Amphicar and how it could have been massaged into something more mass-market. If the 4000 Amphicars sold doesn’t sound like much, remember that’s almost the same number of 911s that Porsche moved in 1967.

Let’s say VW buys the name and intellectual properties of the Amphicar, seeing it as a future of recreational vehicles particularly in the United States. Besides making changes to adapt to upcoming regulations in 1968 that would have deemed the first generation Amphicar unsellable in America, VW would analyze the original car and immediately see two areas that could easily be improved with the original car that they predict could easily double or triple sales.

Problem Number One: It Was Too Damn Slow And Drove Poorly

First, let’s look at more power. Volkswagen during this time was working on a new concept that would ultimately never see the light of day called the EA266. Using an inline four turned on its side and mounted in back facing forwards, this mid-engined proposal was also water-cooled with the radiator mounted opposite the motor. Rear seat passengers actually sit above the motor and the space efficiency of the design is uncanny.

I’d say that VW would look instead at making a shorter, water-cooled flat-four with a rear-mounted radiator, and they’d use that in the new 1967 Generation II Amphicar. The fuel-injected two-liter motor would be hooked up to a four-speed transaxle. Most Amphicars were actually sold in the United States, so later a three-speed automatic option would further help sales even if it killed performance.

Such a layout means that the new Amphicar would have a longer, less stubby-looking wheelbase, as well as a lower center of gravity (critical in a car that by necessity has to be rather jacked up in height) and maybe a small storage space above the motor. Also, this layout would allow for the propellors to be powered by drives coming off of the transaxle, not directly from the crankshaft as on the Schwimmwagen.

As with any radical change of design, you might want to do a “soft launch” and test things first. In 1974, Volkswagen actually released the Golf-based Scirocco sport coupe six months before the full launch of the bread-and-butter Golf to allow them to get any teething problems out of the way. Following this lead, the Amphicar might have been an ideal way for Volkswagen to test out this radical new mechanical layout of the EA266.

Larger Volkswagen-sourced wheels and tires would have helped with ride and drivability, plus they’d act as better rudders in boat mode. Volkswagen would also develop the front disc brakes so they help the front wheels to assist in steering the Amphicar-as-boat better, plus the engineers could have added small fins behind the hubs (I’d give you the German name but it would take up an entire line of this text and only David would be able to read it).

Problem Two: It Looked Ridiculous

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I love the look of the old Amphicar, but I love it for its silliness and not outright beauty. Silliness is not something that usually spells strong sales.

I mean, what’s with the tailfins? At the Amphicar’s introduction in 1961 most American manufacturers had already ditched this silly styling trend, and it looks even sillier on this tiny little car. Up front, there’s nothing really wrong with the raised headlights, but the “pontoon” fenders they cap off look more like mailboxes thanks to their thin edges. The aforementioned stubby wheelbase does no favors to this already compromised design. Taillights, turn signals, and even the hood-mounted horn look like the parts bin whatever-we-could-find things that they certainly were (also a fiberglass body might have been a good idea, as the rust-covering red duct tape on the doors of the for-sale example below shows. Yikes):

One of the biggest issues with the look of the original Amphicar is that it doesn’t even remotely look like a boat or even something that should go in the water in the first place. Almost anything can be made to float and be a boat, but there is a distinctive shape to a water-based machine that should at least be somewhat acknowledged, right?

For the styling of the next-generation 1967 Amphicar, Volkswagen wouldn’t have to look far for inspiration. In the mid- to late-sixties, it seemed like there were a large number of cars that already looked a lot like boats. I’m talking about the peaked, often-grille-free, downward-facing nose like the bow of a schooner, with a chrome perimeter band going around the entire car just below the beltline to cover the seam of the fiberglass cover on top of the body, like the hull of a boat below. There’s a lot of examples of this during the era from the Neue-Klasse BMWs to the second generation Corvair to Volkswagen’s own Type 4 (especially the later Brooks Stevens facelifted 1972-74 412). Jason even felt that these larger VWs should have been offered in amphibious versions in the first place.

Other than adding a little length, moving the rear wheels back more, and putting a very slight rake on the windshield, I didn’t do much else to the basic Amphicar before going to town on smoothing out the body in a manner similar to those other contemporary cars. The chrome perimeter trim actually has a rubber strip in the center to protect the paint when docking in a pier or a parking lot.

Here’s a moprh GIF for you to see the changes:

I’ve added a slight cut in the rocker panels to break up the visual mass of the sides. The horn that’s plopped unceremoniously on the hood of the first-generation Amphicar is gone as well; the horn is moved to the back of the side view mirror. I mean, haven’t you always wanted to honk your mirror?

Red and green light bulbs in the area next to the turn signals act as running lights when in the water instead of the stuck-on-the-hood fixture used with the original Ampicar.

The entire hood tips forward like on an old Saab to access the frunk and spare tire, but there’s another possible trick. The windshield might fold forwards and into the frunk area; you then shut the hood and have full access to the hood from the dashboard all the way to what is now the bow of the boat (we could offer little add-on windshields but the Amphicar likely won’t go fast enough to really need them).

Jason requested the option of non-skid material and rails on the hood to allow you to sunbathe or just hang out on the bonnet, which will now act as a bow deck. The US and European versions have different headlights and license plate mounts, of course (with a body-colored filler in the opening left by the sealed beam headlights).

The back of the 1967 Amphicar looks a lot like the front, with wraparound lights and bumpers; the propellors hide down below as on the original car. Note the exhaust pipes (or exhaust pipe and bilge pump outlet) come out of the license plate recess area. The engine cover tips open from the side or has the hinges at the back of the car; you lift the cover and then the convertible top stows under the cover (there’s also a bit of storage space right behind the seat over the flat engine, ideal for life preservers). You can see the cooling slots for the radiator that could be covered with a full-width scoop to direct more air into the radiator. Like the front, non-skid deck material could be added as well as side rails. Overall, I wanted to make something that, once the wheels are submerged (or you cover the bottom half with your hand on the screen), really looks like a boat.

Onc3e again, a morph between the 1961 car and the proposed 1967 model:

The Amphicar interior was pretty basic; just Teutonic functionality:

The second-generation car interior would still be very functional, utilizing those Volkswagen Beetle round pull switches, radio, and interior door handles that they used on everything (even Porsches). One fun trick is the land-based speedometer naturally won’t work in the water, and marine-based speedometers were notoriously unreliable then and totally useless in a water vessel as slow as the Amphicar would likely be. To that end, once in the water you can pivot the now-useless speedometer down to reveal an illuminated half-dome compass. I always loved how the gauges on James Bond’s Esprit pivoted from automotive to submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me so I had to do at least something similar.

There’s even a pull-out step under the dash to allow you to get to the hood, which is now a bow deck, when the car is in water.

I’m Agreeing With Jason So Something Is Wrong

I know that Jason is often really out there, but I think his opinion that people are overcomplicating the whole amphibious car thing is absolutely correct. Most car owners are not street racing on a daily basis, and boating is more about the relaxation of being on the water for most than pretending to be a 1980s-era Florida coastal drug smuggler in one of Don Aronow’s Cigarettes. Trying to make an amphibious car do either of those things will get you something heavily compromised and, more importantly, cost as much as a house. The whole point of an amphibious car is that it should be cheaper to buy and maintain than having both an automobile and a watercraft in your driveway.

No, the Amphicar made sense for a lot of people. The fact that nearly 4000 were sold tells you that they were a viable product. Unquestionably, with a company like Volkswagen (and Ferdinand Piech) behind it, a next-generation example of the Amphicar could have been a well-built, rather reliable, and reasonably affordable piece, improved upon in a few basic ways without spoiling the formula.

At Disney Springs outside of Disney World, there’s a place that offers rides on one of their four or five restored Amphicars for $125 a pop. That’s a big chunk of change, but as Ernest Hemingway said about pheasant hunting, some things are worth whatever you have to pay for it. Are there any pictures of Amphicars where the people on board aren’t grinning ear-to-ear? Any legal product that can do that is worth revisiting, don’t you think?

Why An Amphibious Cozy Coupe Is As Genius An Idea As It Is Terrible – The Autopian

Our Daydreaming Designer Re-Imagines Vector If They Made Amphibious Supercars – The Autopian

This Incredible Old Amphibious Isuzu Concept Reminds Me Of The Wrongest Assumption In The Automotive Industry – The Autopian

Finally, The Galileo Shuttlecraft Amphibious Camper You’ve Waited Years For – The Autopian