Times Five

Common sense suggests that four wheels are more than enough for most cars, but sometimes that just wasn’t the case. Damien O’Carroll looks at some that went for more.

Sexto-Auto/Octo-Auto

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

His first car, the Octo-Auto was 6 metres long, still seated four and cost US$3200 (about 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 more expensive (US$4500 or NZ$165,000 today) and it was dropped without selling many. The Sexto-Auto and Octo-Auto were praised as extremely comfortable and luxurious.

Tyrrell P34

Technically it is not a ‘‘production’’ car, but the Tyrrell built as many P34 Formula One cars as some of the 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 were quickly banned. Although the Brabham was banned after a few races, the P34 competed long enough to have several 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.

Covini C6W

Covini Engineering was a small Italian company known for the slightly odd sports cars it sold in extremely limited (usually singledigit) numbers. But the oddest of all was one of its earliest designs that took decades to reach 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 in 2004 as a show car before putting it into a limited production run of six to eight cars a year in 2005.

The C6W was RWD and powered by Audi’s 324kW/470Nm 4.2-litre V8 and 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. The limited number is attributed to tyre manufacturer Pirelli’s decision to not go ahead with the promised production of the small bespoke front tyres the Panther needed. The RHD car has vanished but 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 was claimed to develop 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 it did it anyway, and it is utterly awesome.

Sure, there have been many 6x6 off-roaders built out of standard 4x4s before and since, but the G 63 6x6 was a full-blown production vehicle built by a mainstream manufacturer. And it built more than 100 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.