Rick Dobbertin’s 1965 Chevy II and 1985 Pontiac J-2000 are well-known and appreciated within the automotive community for what they were at the time: builds that were further advanced than previous builds had been and polarizing. The Chevy II was built to kill with a supercharged, turbocharged and nitrous-infused big-block Chevy, and the J-2000 was a wild flip-body machine that at first, had no rear suspension past the tire’s deflection and ultimately wound up with valvesprings acting in place of coils. Then things got radical. He turned a milk tanker into the “Dobbertin Surface Orbiter”, a vehicle that was supposed to circumnavigate the earth without help. He made a hell of a trip in the beast, including three thousand miles of open-sea motoring, but funding crapped out and it was back to New York with him. 
Then there was this thing, the Dobbertin HydroCar. The goal was again to have an amphibious vehicle, but this one is scaled down nicely from the Surface Orbiter. It’s legally titled in New York as a custom boat with a hull number, though we aren’t completely clear about the license plate situation. The idea was a truly useable amphibious vehicle that would skip the trailer portion of the whole truck/boat experience, but things weren’t working out completely. The last time we knew the Hydrocar was going up for sale, it was having issues when in the water…the prop was having trouble getting any kind of propulsion going and when it did, the HydroCar tried to go all submarine up front. At a sevelte 8,500 pounds curb weight, the overall effect is a over-scale Lotus in the water and a very strange duck when it’s on the land.
Dobbertin originally wanted to mass-market these things but only built one and wound up putting himself in a financial bind to complete it as you see it. For $120,000 buy-it-now you can bring it home and do…well, whatever you want to. It would be difficult to resist the urge to repurpose the World/Merlin 572 big-block Chevrolet and Quadzilla 4L80E for a different project and to turn the HydroCar into a museum piece, but there is something neat about one man building such a beast. Would you keep it whole or would you go ahead and harvest the good stuff off of it?
Make a trip to the middle of the ocean somewhete, rig it it full of C4 and well you know the rest, at the bottom of the ocean.
Also, what’s with all the gauges?
At 8500 lbs, it doesn’t need any C4. It will sink like a rock all on its own.
Rick Dobbertin should have a reality tv show. He’s an eccentric craftsman, but in a good gear-head sort of way. (Discovery/Velocity, are you listening?)
In 1994, I was lucky enough to see his Dobbertin Surface Orbiter parked near the airport in Grenada. Having no frame of reference on how cool this was, my Wife and Family were hardly impressed to see a self powered milk tanker with wheels. Pfttt.