Your first car was your best car. Well, it was almost definitely your worst car, at least in TLCB’s home nation where astronomical insurance costs prevent new drivers from owning anything with an engine larger than a lawnmower, but it was still your first taste of freedom.
However step back around ten years from your first actual roadworthy* vehicle, and you may have owned something even more special. For some of you it might have been the gloriously lethal Radio Flyer Wagon, alternatively it could have been this, the marvellous Kettler Kettcar.
Produced from the 1960s right up until Kettler’s sad bankruptcy at the start of this year, the Kettcar was a superb design that taught handbrake turns to decades of children.
Along with that simple handbrake the Kettcar was also fitted with a rudimentary gearbox, enabling drive via the pedals or neutral for free-wheeling down big hills, where that handbrake would be hopelessly inadequate.
Recreating the pedal drive, handbrake, and gearbox is Clemens Schneider, whose brilliant Technic recreation of the Kettler Kettcar was suggested to us by a reader. In fact so accurate is Clemens’ Technic replica that it would probably drive just like the real thing if you were small enough to fit inside.
There’s more of the Kettcar to see at Clemens’ photostream – click the link above to pull the handbrake!
*Definition of roadworthiness is – in our case at least – loose.