In today’s world you can pick up the phone, spend $100,000 and buy yourself a completely insane sand car to dominate the dunes or whatever other surface you can imagine. Such was not always the case. In fact when this stuff got going more than half a century ago, things were different. Proof? This 1950s/1960s sand car video has it is spades. Taking a VW bug and stripping the engine off and adding some large tires was about as cutting edge as it got for a while and we love those crude little killers. This video shows them off perfectly.
Our favorite thing about this is the “in-car” video that shows a dad and his two kids ripping around the sand. The dad is all squinted up because of flying sand, the kid in the middle looks like he is about to crap his pants and the kid on the outside (what little we can see of him) seems to be as cool as a cucumber.
While today’s huge horsepower, tube chassis, sand cars can literally shoot themselves across water, climb dunes in a single bound, and jump like they have wings, they are not “better” than what you see in these videos. Different for sure but the rigs you see in the video below had the driver and passengers completely connected to the dunes. There was nothing to save you if you made a bad call and with the little horsepower that they had, you needed to know how to drive to actually have fun in them. Paddle tires? Those were a long, long way off.
These old sand cars are pure nostalgia! Watching those bumpy rides with minimal horsepower is a reminder that adventure was simpler back then.