Transportation
This Weirdo Car Could Have Driven on Water
Chevrolet’s amphibious truck, prototyped in 1961, never quite caught on.
In 1961, the German Quandt Group released a pretty crazy-looking vehicle: the Amphicar. As CityLab’s Laura Bliss wrote in a retrospective last year, this boat/car hybrid was manufactured in Germany until 1965, but the majority of the 3,900 made found their way to “well-heeled sports enthusiasts” in the U.S.
General Motors could not let the Germans just go ahead and own the American amphibious car space. Inspired by the Amphicar, two company engineers, Richard E. Hulten and Roger D. Holm, decided to take the just-released Chevrolet “Corvan” and soup it up a bit. They closed up the bottom, added a rudder, two propellers, and voila: They had a prototype for the “Corphibian,” the Chevrolet car that could also walk (or paddle) on water.