The British chemical engineer Peter Wheeler, who ran TVR from 1981 to 2005, came up with the idea for a car that could go off-road and on water at speeds of up to eight knots. And his team came up with the idea for the TVR Scamander. But Wheeler sold TVR before it was built. Lucky for us, Wheeler kept working on it after he sold TVR, and his son Joe still has the only working version that was ever made. In this new movie, Joe Wheeler lets Harry Metcalf look into it. It’s silly in the best way possible.
The Scamander was made by Graham Browne, who has been in charge of TVR design for a long time. It has an almost industrial look to it. It looks more like heavy tools than a car for the road. It has three seats and a center driving position, like a GMA T.50 or McLaren F1, when you pull down its huge power-operated canopy.
Before he tragically died in 2009, Metcalf had the chance to talk to Wheeler and drive the Scamander. “To be honest, I made it for myself,” Wheeler said in an interview with MetalF in 2008. “Since I like sailing, shooting, and driving on a track, I wanted something that could accommodate all of these activities.” This is what I call an RRV, or rapid response vehicle. You should not call it a car.
Even though it is allowed to drive on the road, the Scamander doesn’t feel like a car, so that is the best way to describe it. Metcalf even gave the Scamander for Evo another grade in 2015, this time focusing on how well it handled off-road and how smooth the ride was. For its size, he was happy with how well it handled on the road.
It has an automatic gearbox and a 3.0-liter Ford V6 engine that makes 275 horsepower. The engine only has two wheels to save weight. Tall all-terrain tires give you grip off-road. It was first made with paddles attached to the back wheels to help it move through water, but that didn’t work well enough, so it was changed to have a propeller at the back that looked like the GMA T.50’s rear fan. Metcalf showed how well it worked by using it in the water in 2015.
But the irresponsible desire went beyond the ship’s ability to swim and land. Wheeler thought of a flexible back end that could be used for a truck bed, a passenger area, or even military weapons like a mounted machine gun. The British navy was interested in the Scamander even before Wheeler’s death.
In this brand-new movie, they turn on the Scamander for the first time in more than ten years. You can see inside it and learn about all of its amazing features.
In this day and age of the internet, everyone has seen crazy car stacks. The Scamander is more than just a crazy-big prototype, though; it’s also very interesting and works perfectly. It was never made, which is a shame.
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