A Car That Runs On Water

Whenever we write about high-end sports cars, such as the Lamborghini Gallardo we're covering this week, we nearly always get letters from readers. Such e-mails generally say either, "Whoa! I want one!!" or "Whoa! Who on earth needs such a thing?!"

To the former we say, "Me, too!" To the latter we say, "It's not aboutneed."

And so it goes with the latest supercar, er, boat, the Aquada. For Alan Gibbs, the multi-millionaire entrepreneur from New Zealand who invented the Aquada, desire is the "driving force" behind creativity.

Gibbs--whose career has included stints in manufacturing, merchant banking, pay television and auto dealerships--was co-lead on a syndicate that purchased New Zealand Telecom (nyse: NZT - news - people ) in the 1990s. Although he now spends most of his time in London, he also owns a large farm on the New Zealand coast, where the tides happen to be huge. Suddenly boats moored on the shoreline at night would be stuck in the mud as the tide went out the next morning. Which got Gibbs thinking; why had nobody had ever made a successful amphibious car (see the Forbes Fact below)?

Not long later Gibbs moved to the U.K. and, obsessed as he'd now become with the idea of Aquada, bumped into Neil Jenkins, an automotive mastermind who'd worked with the likes of Jaguar and Rolls-Royce. Jenkins began to work with Gibbs and hit upon an idea for wheels that would retract out of the water when the car became a boat--to reduce drag--and on a way to make the body itself both aero- and hydrodynamic.

Then Gibbs and Jenkins founded Gibbs Technologies in England, and farmed out concept work to firms both in Britain and the U.S. For instance, engineering work began with niche maker and engineering house Lotus in England, and full structural and crash testing also went forward.

One difficult problem was how to propel the craft through the water. The solution was water-jet power. Previous amphibious vehicles, both civilian and military, used propellers or other devices that could be dangerous when the craft was cruising down a road. The Aquada, by contrast, uses a water-powered jet capable of one ton of force (driven by the same, 175 hp V-6 used to move the drive wheels when the Aquada is on land). The jet is also steerable, meaning that it works like powered rudder when the tiller (aka, steering wheel) is turned.

As for actual stats, Gibbs claims a top speed on land of 100 mph, and above 30 mph on the water. The three-passenger craft--the driver sits in the middle--has no doors, but there are outrigger-type runners that can be used as steps to help users climb aboard. Production will be limited at first to around 100-200 vehicles annually at the cost of about $240,000 per.

But it is Alan Gibbs' hope that the technology itself will be the big seller.

Customers could be military and other services, but ambulances using these principles might be the biggest winners. In cities from Seattle to New York where water is plentiful and roads are packed, patients might be rushed from home or office to a hospital via an ambulance that can use both roads and rivers or lakes. And of course, the cost of one Gibbs-equipped ambulance is far less than any competing-medium craft--such as a helicopter.

Forbes Fact

Other water/road-going vehicles have mostly grown out of military applications and have always found shortcomings on either land, sea, or in both settings. As recently as the 1960s there was the German Amphicar (born of an original troop-transport design), which was entirely ungainly, difficult to steer, and had a tendency to overheat.

Another big knock: Amphicar at one point was built by the same factory that made WWII Luger pistols, giving it not entirely the right kind of fun, friendly reputation a car/boatmaker might hope for.