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Five Things: when four wheels isn't enough

Monday, 17 May 2021

Sometimes having just four wheels isn't enough for a car. Here are five times that was the case.

Four has generally been accepted to be the optimum number of wheels a car needs from fairly early on in the automobile’s history. But sometimes, whether it be through sheer necessity or simple mental imbalance, four wheels just aren’t enough.

Today we take a look at our five favourite cars that actually made it into production with more than four wheels.

Sexto-Auto/Octo-Auto

Milton Reeve’s business plan seems to have been ‘make it much longer, much heavier, but offer no more power or room. Oh, and it should be frighteningly expensive too’
Milton Reeve’s business plan seems to have been ‘make it much longer, much heavier, but offer no more power or room. Oh, and it should be frighteningly expensive too’

Sometimes you just need to do something different, and that was clearly the case for Milton Reeve in 1911 when he founded the Sexto-Octo Company and started converting Overland cars into six and eight wheelers.

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While it was radical and somewhat successful, the Tyrrell P34 was quickly banned by the FIA when it decreed that cars should have four wheels.
While it was radical and somewhat successful, the Tyrrell P34 was quickly banned by the FIA when it decreed that cars should have four wheels.

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The Covini C6W took more than 30 years to make it inot production, and even then they only built very few of them.
The Covini C6W took more than 30 years to make it inot production, and even then they only built very few of them.

His first car, the Octo-Auto was 6 metres long, still only seated four and cost US$3200, or roughly the equivalent of NZ$125,000 today. It wasn’t a success, so he had a second go, dropping one set of front wheels and building the Sexto-Auto on a Stutz chassis.

Strangely, dropping two wheels made it even more expensive (US$4500 or NZ$165,000 today) and it to dropped from view without selling many. Both the Sexto-Auto and Octo-Auto were praised as extremely comfortable and luxurious vehicles though.

Tyrrell P34

Only two Panther Sixes were ever built, because Pirelli decided there probably wasn’t profit to be made making tiny bespoke tyres for a car that would sell in miniscule numbers.
Only two Panther Sixes were ever built, because Pirelli decided there probably wasn’t profit to be made making tiny bespoke tyres for a car that would sell in miniscule numbers.

Okay, so it's technically not a ‘production’ car as such, but the Tyrrell built as many P34 Formula One cars as some of the actual production cars on this list anyway…

The P34 and the Brabham BT46B ‘Fan Car’ were two of the most radical F1 cars ever to race, let alone taste victory, and both were quickly banned. But while the Brabham was banned after a few races, the P34 competed long enough to have a number of other teams start developing their own six-wheeled competitors.

Williams, Ferrari and March all tested prototypes before the FIA killed the fun, leaving the Tyrrell as not only the only six-wheeled car to win a race in F1, but the only one ever to have competed.

Mercedes-Benz was much more serious about the whole six-wheel thing, building more than 100 examples of the superbly mental G 63 6x6.
Mercedes-Benz was much more serious about the whole six-wheel thing, building more than 100 examples of the superbly mental G 63 6x6.

Covini C6W

Covini Engineering was a small Italian company known for slightly odd sports cars it sold in extremely limited (usually single digit) numbers. But the oddest of them all was one of the company’s earliest designs that took decades to make it into a production form – the six-wheeled C6W.

Starting life in the mid-1970s as a project inspired by the Tyrrell P34 F1 car, the C6W concept lay dormant for several decades before the company revived it 2004 as a show car before putting it into a limited production run of 6 to 8 cars a year in 2005.

The C6W was RWD and powered by Audi’s 324kW/470Nm 4.2-litre V8 and it was produced until 2016.

Panther Six

Like the Covini C6W, the Panther Six featured four front wheels to do the steering, but its production run makes the Covini look like a Toyota Corolla in comparison.

Just two examples are known to have been produced in 1977 – one in left-hand drive, one in right-hand drive – with the limited number being attributed to tyre manufacturer Pirelli’s decision to not go ahead with the promised production of the small bespoke front tyres the Panther needed.

While the RHD car has vanished from view and thought to be somewhere in the Middle East, the LHD one sold at Auction in the UK for NZ$70,000 in 2011. Both featured a mid-mounted, twin turbo 8.2-litre Cadillac V8 which the company claimed developed more than 445kW.

Mercedes-AMG G63 6x6

There was literally no legitimate reason for Mercedes-Benz to build the G 63 6x6 in 2013, but they did it anyway, and it is utterly awesome.

Sure, there have been many 6x6 off-roaders built out of standard 4x4s before and since (most famously the Hennessey VelociRaptor and Goliath 6x6 conversions of the Ford F-150 Raptor and Chev Silverado, as well as various Land Rovers, Hummers and Jeeps, to name a few), but the G 63 6x6 was a full-blown production vehicle built by a mainstream manufacturer. And they built more than 100 of them in total too.

Powered by AMG’s mighty 5.5-litre twin-turbo V8, the 6x6 featured portal axles, an on-board compressor for automatically increasing or decreasing tyre pressures and FIVE locking differentials. Yes, sometimes overkill is simply necessary.