MOTO-SCAT

An particularly peculiar 'stillborn' from the archives, presenting the Herzog Conte Schwimmwagen....

Conte by Hugo90, on Flickr

For the Conte amphibious car, there are no borders at rivers, seas or coasts.

Even at low depth of water, the car swims and the drive goes on. The hydraulic twinscrew system with power steering gives sufficient speed to the car also in string flow in rivers.

The steering in the water is operated by the front wheels now freely standing and the twinscrews.

The landing and continuous driving is easy with the differential pawl built into every car - a short braking to dry the disk and drum brakes - and the drive goes on over land as in a normal vehicle.

Conte by Hugo90, on Flickr

Based on well-proven Ford mechanicals, this neither-fish-nor-fowl creation was to be available with the choice of the 110bhp 2.3 or 140bhp 2.8 litre 'Cologne' V6 engines. At this point I could make a very obvious BOAT-ANCHOR joke, but I will wager that you're well ahead of me on that one already. This powerplant would have given the vehicle a theoretical top-speed of approx 80mph on land, though that would probably demand quite a run-up and a certain bravery on behalf of the driver captain, given that it weighed 2.3 tonnes and, well, it looks like an ill-proportioned lego-car so you can probably figure out what the handling etc would be like...



In addition the thing came with independent suspension, locking rear diff and hi/lo ratio gearbox. I would imagine that this would be useful for hauling itself up slimy slipways out of the wet stuff rather than any pretension to 'off road' in the checker-plate-and-anourak sense.



It would appear that it never got past the prototypes as seen here in these brochure shots (it was also exhibited at Frankfurt in '79), which is hardly surprising given the historical success [or lack of] for car-boat combos which manage to be too expensive, and unappealing to both car types and boaties alike.



See also: Dutton Amphijeep, etc

Interesting CONTENT.

Those things are SUPA-FUGLY.

Good work on doing the words and that.

THNX 4 HOSTN PICS SOMEWEAR I CAN SEE IT AT WORK,,,

Wowsers, 2.6 tonnes! One would think that adding lightness to anything that's supposed to float would be an advantage, no? So I was wondering on the date of this, which I didn't see mentioned. Google doesn't throw up many clues, I guessed at early 80's by the design. Der sind schlechter Englisher worden on einer Deutsche Granada enthusiast's forum, ja, that suggest the prototype was 1979, steel body, mainly Ford parts: http://forum.hecktrieb.de/index.php?pag ... adID=39905

Interesting-looking bunch of guys.

Some 'sehr gut, ja' highly* amusing* German anecdotes on there too which I'll translate if anyone is remotely interested. Probably faster* and more accurate* to use Babelfisch, mind.

*funny use of irony

Looks utterly dreadful! Nice find.

There must be a horrendous amphibian built every decade or so. None of the builders (or investors) ever learn from history. I see on this one they solved the problem the Amphicars could have , of leaking doors, simply by making the thing so tall the doors are above the water line. Since the running gear is German Ford that roof line/screen/front window area looks quite a lot like its come from a Cortina.

Seth wrote:There must be a horrendous amphibian built every decade or so. None of the builders (or investors) ever learn from history.

Gibbs (of Aquada fame) did a pretty good job - however from what I gather, it was meant more as a PR exercise to provide awareness for various patents, which they are now applying to utility / military amphibious vehicles. There have also been a few pretty competent leisure amphibious cars built in the USA. Can't remember the name off the top of my head, but iirc one used a lot of previous generation Camaro parts (lights etc). The styling was somewhat challenging though.