Price £22,000
MPG 30
Top speed 85mph
On sea 6mph
Flooding holds no fear for Tim Dutton. As one of the world’s only builders of amphibious cars, he knows that rising water levels lead to rising sales. We are standing in his garage at the top of a slipway looking across the River Arun to the Littlehampton marina. Albert Steptoe would feel right at home here. Every corner of his workshop is crammed with boxes of tools and spares. The air is thick with epoxy resin. An employee who has been gluing strips of fibreglass to the hull of a car emerges from the chaos, his eyes almost spinning in his head.
Tim starts to show me around. We climb a wobbly ladder to a sort of hayloft, stepping over loose planks and more body panels. “They’re beginning to call me an eccentric engineer,” he says with a mystified laugh. “Really?” I gasp, as if it would never have occurred to me. He buzzes with energy and enthusiasm and it’s easy to forget he was once a pretty formidable entrepreneur. He almost singlehandedly invented the kitcar business and, from 1973 to 1989, employed up to 80 people producing some 8,000 self-designed Dutton sports cars. “Total nightmare,” he says, “worrying about that many people. And I wanted to get back to working with my hands… So I decided to build something no one had got right in decades – the amphicar!” With a triumphant salute, he waves an arm above one of his half-built Dutton Surfs. It’s bright yellow and looks like a cross between a rubber duck and a 4x4.
Tim now makes about 10 of these curious hybrids a year (you can also buy them in kit form for £10,000). He sells them all around the world and all sorts of people buy them. Most just want to have fun, but some are for more serious applications. Tim says he’s sold some to the military. Sailors love them, apparently. Rather than worrying about towing a tender to the coast they can just drive straight on to their yacht’s mooring.
The Surf is actually Tim’s third amphicar. There have also been the Mariner and the Commander and he’s currently developing the all-new Reef. He’s been in the motoring game for almost 50 years, which means he holds several unexpected records: Dutton is the oldest car company in the world still wholly owned by its founder; and he’s been manufacturing amphibious cars for longer than all the other amphibious car companies put together.
The Surf is fully compliant with all vehicle regulations, except it has dispensation not to include airbags. “They’d explode every time you docked,” Tim explains. He uses the Suzuki Jimny as a donor vehicle – marrying its working parts to his hull and deck. The boat/car hybrid has both wheels and a jet-propulsion unit. You simply move a lever when you slip from land to sea.
A month after visiting Tim, I took one of his Surfs for a swim/drive in the Thames. It was a surreal experience. Nothing quite matches the weirdness of motoring down a ramp and seamlessly out into the water. People waved and smiled, and we laughed in disbelief. It was bizarre, bonkers and brilliant.
For more information on Dutton cars, go to dtech.uk.com
Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @MartinLove166
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