Some days you need a boat.
Some days you need a car.
And some days you wake up feeling like James Bond and say, “F**k it, I’ll take both.”
So goes the legend of the Chevrolet Corphibian, an amphibious, one-off 1961 model that’s being sold off by Mecum Auctions in Florida on January 23rd.
In anticipation of an increased demand for amphibious vehicles that never actually came to fruition (shocking), Richard Hulten and Roger Holm of the Hulten-Holm Company of Pontiac, Michigan, teamed up with Chevy engineers to create a propeller-packing prototype of a land/seacraft in the early 1960s.
Unfortunately for Hulten and Holm — who, legend also holds, held up one finger for land tests and two if by sea — they only built a single Corphibian before auto executives realized perhaps vehicles that could travel by both land and water weren’t the wave of the future. But the extended body and fiberglass hull of the craft were constructed nonetheless, and the dual-threat vehicle made it 157 miles before being stashed in a garage (boathouse?) before being discovered more than 30 years later.
Fast forward a couple decades and the fully restored model boasts an air-cooled engine, automatic transmission, dual propellers and a wooden rudder that can be controlled from cab or bed and is expected to fetch as much as $75,000-$100,000 later this month.
Mark your calendars, duck boaters anonymous.
This article was featured in the InsideHook newsletter. Sign up now.
