You know what I believe in? A lot of things, really, but some standout pillars of the temple of my beliefs are the inherent dignity of corndogs, despite their shape and stick-based method of delivery, the fundamental goodness of humankind, and the absolute joy and rationality of an amphibious car. I’ve gone on and on about this before; I genuinely believe that amphibious cars should be widely enjoyed, and as common as, say, more terrestrial off-roaders are today.
I realize they’re not, and I see that as a tragedy of colossal proportions, an example of humanity foolishly denying themselves happiness.
It’s not like there haven’t been at least some attempts, the most famous of which has to be the Amphicar, a West German swimming-car with a rear-mounted Triumph engine that is probably the closest that an Amphibious car has ever come to widespread civilian success.
It wasn’t really a success, but it’s still a charming and fascinating machine, and you can drive it right into the water.
I once got to have an on-water-and-land drag race with one as I piloted another, weirder amphibious car:
I lost on water, but won on land, in case you’re curious.
Anyway, I’m a big fan of the Amphicar, so when I happened to see some scans of an old Amphicar brochure showing how an Amphicar could be outfitted to act as a sort of aquatic rescue vehicle, I was extremely excited. An aquatic rescue vehicle based on one of these makes so much sense, but I never realized the factory had an official solution and option packages for just this sort of thing!
The top image of this Cold Start shows the full set of equipment a rescue Amphicar could have, and above you see that it all manages to be mounted on and in the Amphicar in quite a tidy, unobtrusive way.
According to the International Amphicar Owners’ Club, here’s what a fully equipped rescue Amphicar included:
Water and gas containers, life-boat, grappling iron, rotating beacons, pockets for luggage and first aid kits, box for implements, stretcher, pulley block, throwing anchor, folding anchor, axe, hatchet, spade, megaphone, signal pistol, fork frame, dischargeable light buoy, leashes, fenders and torches.
That’s a lot! And I have no idea what a “fork frame” does!
Look how cleverly the foldable stretcher deploys, using the whole rear deck of the car to accommodate the unfortunate patient. It’s amazing to think about a stretcher even being possible in a car not much bigger than an MGB.
Inside you can see that with all the equipment, there’s still room to seat two, even with that line-throwing equipment with its launch-able buoy set up behind the seats. That’s a big megaphone under the dash.
The former rear seat contained a lot of equipment, including some storage lockers and the line-throwing hardware. Other equipment, like the stretcher and an inflatable lifeboat are mounted on the rear luggage rack.
Up in the front trunk, even more equipment lurks, including spare fuel, ropes and block-and-tackles, some box full of first-aid equipment, and what I think is the fork frame thing. I tried looking it up but just got a lot of pictures of forklift parts and bike frames.
if you had to patrol something like a lake, with people potentially needing assistance both on and off shore, an Amphicar like this seems just ideal. An Englishman named Ian Metcalfe in 1966 seemed to think so, as he ordered one well-outfitted from the factory for the Fire Authorities, according to these documents obtained by the International Amphicar Owner’s Club:
All that equipment adds up to DM 5,015.50; in today’s money, converting from 1966 Deutschmarks to modern US dollars, that comes to a non-trivial $12,500 or so, and that’s on top of the price of an Amphicar in 1966, which was $3,395, or about $33,000 today. I guess if you think about it, $45,500 for an amphibious rescue vehicle is actually kind of a deal?
I just think this is one of the coolest vehicles of any type I’ve seen. And it comes with a fork frame!
I dunno, man. I don’t trust the IAOC…
How about an amphibious rescue vehicle that’s faster than the Amphicar on water, probably faster on land, and can even travel over deep mud or sand that would stop pretty much every other kind of vehicle?
Hovercraft! The RNLI have seven of them that are stationed near mudflats and sand where people often get caught out by tides. The water is too shallow for a boat, and the sand/mud is too soft for a wheeled vehicle, but a hovercraft glides above it all.
https://rnli.org/what-we-do/lifeboats-and-stations/our-lifeboat-fleet/rescue-hovercraft
I saw Aquarium Rescue Unit on the H.O.R.D.E. tour in I think 1991, which is basically the same thing.
Amphilance to the rescue! At nine miles per hour. Be patient, Patient.
That was a charming vehicle you were in. But if I was in medical distress on a lake, I think I’d rather be picked up by a dedicated patrol/rescue boat and crew and taken much more swiftly to a dock or boat ramp and met up with a dedicated terrestrial ambulance and their crew.
When I was 10 or so, I did see an Amphicar on Clear Lake in Northern California on our annual Labor Day weekend vacation. That was the summer I managed to get up on water skis behind a vintage Chris-Craft owned by one of my dad’s college buddies.
The Chris-Craft blew a head gasket, but there was a shop across the lake that had a replacement, and his buddy and my dad managed to (drunkenly) replace it by, oh 11 pm and the boat ran fine the next day. My dad was a pretty good wrencher.
Did the guy you raced in the Amphicar own both of those? And if we’re going to go amphibious, I want James Bond’s Lotus Esprit. And his Bond Girl.
Don’t know if they were ever factory produced/supported, but at least a few of the VW Schwimmwagens were fitted out as fire/rescue vehicles after WWII, so this wasn’t exactly a new idea.
I feel like the Amphicar would have really taken off if they’d been able to do a Mk2 and fix some of the quality-of-life issues on the first one:
3: Make the body out of fiberglass or aluminum so it no longer has a tragic tendency to rust into oblivion after being used as a boat.
The thing with all the tines sticking up is part of a “Faking box” ( I’ve also heard it called “flaking”). F(l)aking is a term for laying down a line so that it doesn’t tangle when it’s pulled back out of it’s container.
A heaving line is wrapped diagonally back and forth around the tines, then the entire thing was inverted in a box where the line falls off in a nice pattern that pulls out quickly and smoothly without tangles when a rescue float or weight is shot towards the vessel or person in distress.
Typically used with a “Lyle gun” which is a small cannon that fires that first light line to a stranded vessel that can be used to pull a heavier line ( the hawser ) and a breeches bouy ( like a life ring with a harness ) used to haul stranded sailors safely to shore from the stranded boat.
Here’s a very slow paced video showing the firing of a Lyle gun with the usage of a faking box at the beginning. https://youtu.be/BW6NkeWH7-o?si=DQIi0Qw9wJ0knDdA
An Internet search for faking box will also turn up a lot of images of them, though the video linked above will show it in use after which it will make a lot more sense. I’ve seen them in a few maritime museums, particularly the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point, MI.
I don’t think they’re used much any more with the advent of rescue helicopters with winches.
Here’s a better look at a faking box, the line winding instructions and the heaving line nicely organized inside the box before use.
I’m pretty sure the box in the frunk of the Amphicar next to the fork frame thing is the other part of the faking box and is a part of the “Line throwing gear, complete ” item on the receipt.
https://provincetownindependent.org/history/2024/01/10/a-faking-box-full-of-seafaring-history/
Thank you for this! Some day I’ll have to take a drive up to the UP and check out that museum.
It’s pretty good. I’ve been there with my RV a half dozen years ago, but this summer I got the chance to take my trailer up to the cool state breakwater/dock that’s within walking distance of the museum.
Plus, fudge at the gift shop!
yup, you got it!
dunno how they went from “faking box” to “fork frame”.
Jason is a smart guy with what I’m betting is a pretty wild set of obscure information running around in his brain, but it seems like he was operating off some photos and images of a sales receipt. The receipt would appear to include the faking box as part of the “line throwing gear, complet” without naming all the parts.
Plus, they do kind of look like fork tines.
I’m in the position that I’ve got a fairly obscure set of odd information rattling around my head as well, but I suspect more of it is about boats. Plus, I’ve been living on my diesel trawler on and off for half a decade ( while doing the Great Loop ) which has included visiting a pretty good number of maritime museums since like me, they tend to be around water.
FWIW, I would have called it a flaking box, because I’m pretty familiar with the word flaking as a modern word but “faking” is one that I can’t say I recall hearing before.
That thing with metal tines, suspected of being the fork frame—could that possibly be a sort of land anchor, to be stomped into the ground on a shore that was too steep to drove up on, and no trees to tie to?
About as useful as an BMW Isetta for the Autobahn police.
Why? I could see this being great for lakes where you might need to rescue a stranded paddle boat or something, or for cases where a patient on the shore is relatively stable, but it’s more efficient to directly cross the lake than drive them all the way around. A boat may be faster, but a boat can’t drive them to a clinic either.
“That’s a big megaphone under the dash.”
Such a classic example of car-enthusiast porn!
I keep looking at what we’re calling a fork frame and thinking that maybe it’s something else, though I’m not sure what. There is a thing called a Dacon rescue frame for water rescues that might be what they refer to as a fork frame, but it looks nothing like the thing above.
similarly, i’d thought of a larkin rescue frame to extend over gunwales and pull load straight up out of water…like a fancy davit crane.
Fork Frame;
First thought was a device for gathering up rope that allows it to easily deploy when launching something, then remembered the elaborate ruse perpetrated by the dish and the spoon.
Thank you for my regular reminder for how much I need an Amphicar in my life.
Torch is starting a rap career, his stage name is Lil’ Fork Frame.
with future iterations of “Lil’ F” and “FF” when he wants to release genre-bending albums.
He’ll have some fancy events too, like the FF tiny ship regatta. It will be held annually in March at Uncle Bill’s Pet Superstore using the giant tank normally reserved for the electric eels.
You have to be careful about shortening your music handle though, lest you wind up like Puff Daddy/P Diddy/Diddy/The Defendant.
So, to be absolutely clear, this is an Amphicar intended to be used as a rescue vehicle, not an Amphicar that needed rescuing? Blows the mind.
I think the level of optimism here is pretty high.
If you have two people who need rescuing and send someone in the Amphicar to save them, all you’ve done is make three people who need rescuing.
Nice.
The fork frame is for grilling bratwurst. It looks like you could do 20 a time on that thing. Those Germans love their brats!
I’m a Wisconsin resident and I approve this message.
Don’t you skewer ze Wurst! It will loose ze juice.
In graduate school I had a limnology professor who used an Amphicar as a research vessel. He and his students would drive from the University to the lakes, collect samples and then drive back to the University. It was cool.
I’m not sure if they still do, but there used to be a big car show for these here in Ohio every year. Like multiples of them driving into a lake at once, was a fun sight to see.
Where at in Ohio? This sounds like something I need to see live with my own eyes.
While this is extremely cool, I struggle to imagine a worse rescue vehicle lol. A lot of emergencies in the water happen when the weather is bad, and this thing can handle, what, 1 foot waves at most? The other fairly common thing with rescues is that speed and time matter, and this thing tops out at sub-10mph in the water.
So while I’m glad this exists as a historical novelty, I cannot imagine a world where a small pickup and a zodiac aren’t both a cheaper and substantially more effective solution lol.
It’s probably still cheaper than a modern pickup and zodiac, but I’m sure a modernized newly built Amphicar would cost a hell of a lot more than the original’s price adjusted for inflation. Then you have to think about how practical a rescue craft that can’t take more than two people at a time really is.
The only real use case I can think of would be island hopping on a big lake to rescue campers. You don’t need to dock and disembark on the other side and lug the patient and your gear; just drive right up the boat ramp and now you have a
golf cartSxS.I was thinking islands in lakes, too, and campers on opposite shores from the town makes sense, too. It could be great in that place where there’s an island in a lake in an island in a lake.
If you want your mind blown, look up the pictures of these crossing the English Channel (in decently bad weather).