The right stuff for the white stuff
If you were an engineer looking to build an off-road vehicle in 1950s’ Austria, you too might have hit on the idea of convering a Volkswagen T1 into a sort of ATV. That’s what Kurt Kretzner did – and the vehicle he created as a result has just emerged, fully restored, after 37 years in the doldrums Words: Tom Alderney Pictures: Volkswagen
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t’s often said that if you live in a mountainous region such as the Alps, you don’t really need a fully fledged 4x4. Of course, winter brings its challenges – but unless you specifically want to go off-road, an all-wheel drive version of an everyday car will do the job as well as anything else. That’s where vehicles like the Fiat Panda
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4x4 and Volkswagen Golf Country came from. Armed with a set of snow chains, there’s nothing short of fully blocked roads that will prevent vehicles like these from getting where they need to be. That’s what makes them a common sight in parts of Europe where, for much of the year, ‘off-roading’ is not so much about recreation as just getting from A to B. But what if you also need to get to C? In fact, what if you also need to get to D, E and everything the whole way to Z? That’s the problem an Austrian engineer by the name of Kurt Kretzner set out to solve way back in the late 1950s. Land Rover and Jeep were already very well established by this time, and Japan’s motor industry had moved confidently into the postwar era with
4x4 04/07/2022 23:07
