King of the Road Warriors

3 minute read
Elizabeth Keenan

When Paul Watson drives to work at Yatala, on Brisbane’s southern edge, he rides high—and not just because of his vehicle’s 37-in. wheels. He enjoys the double-takes people give his khaki and brown car-or-truck-or-is-it-a-tank: “They’ll come up and say, Wow, that’s awesome,” says Watson. But the biggest lift comes from driving something that once existed only in his imagination: “To drive it down the road and think, ‘We built this’—that’s a real buzz.”

Rhino Buggies, the firm Watson runs with his son and three staff, makes cars that out-hum the Hummer. They can drive over boulders as big as a Barina and through water that would flood a Falcon. The $58,000 Blizzard has a Nissan Patrol chassis, engine and gearbox, but nothing else about it is ordinary. It’s Mad Max in a suit: stylish, smooth riding, thanks to adjustable shock absorbers, but tough enough for anything, from the Outback to the Apocalypse. That’s too tough for Australian transport authorities. “They say it’s too intimidating for on-road use,” says Watson. (Most of his clients live on farms or overseas; his Blizzard variant has dealer license plates.)

The first vehicles Watson made were happily off-road as well as off-beat: kooky-looking buggies called Stalkers, for which he sold DIY kits as far afield as Poland. As demand grew, so did Rhino Buggies’ ambitions. “Clients wanted something they could have fun with in the bush but also drive to the office,” says Watson, sitting in an office littered with toy plastic rhinos and model LandRovers and Jeeps. So he and his mates came up with the (road approved) Hammer, a Hummer replica on a Nissan chassis. Then, one day, they sat down with paper, pen and ruler and conceived the Blizzard. Which in turn begat their pice de rsistance (and Watson’s own ride): the Panic Truck.

The Indonesian Army had asked Rhino Buggies to make a military version of the Blizzard (it wants to buy 100): “They liked the fact that they’re really easy to work on and parts are easy to come by,” says Watson. Some Australian ex-soldiers saw the prototype and, he recalls, said, “‘Can you build us a panic truck?’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘You know, if anything goes down, you can panic, get in it and go.'” So into a camouflage-painted Blizzard went a GPS navigation system, two-way radio, radar, spaces for food, water, fuel and a nuclear-biological-chemical air filter (“You can pressurize the cabin and breathe through that”), ultra-long-life batteries, and, on the sides, a pick, shovel, and mats for bogged wheels. Three Panic Trucks have been built and five are in the works, says Watson, who loves the passion with which people embrace his creations: “They’ll say, ‘Oh, I got a chip on my bonnet.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, it’s only a car.’ And they say, ‘No. No, it’s not.”

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