Throttle-Back Thursday: Is that … a six-wheeled Fiat Panda?

As a nod to the 2020 Jeep Gladiator pickup, which we’ve covered extensively over the past week, we dived into the Autoweek archives to find a review of the CJ-8 Scrambler … and came up empty-handed.

But we did come back with this: a six-wheeled Fiat Panda we covered in the Dec. 31, 1985, issue of Autoweek. At least one of these was built by Heilbronn, West Germany’s Horst Koch Automobil GmbH body shop. And they were willing to build you one for the equivalent of $6,000, to start, plus the cost of a Panda. You could even reportedly choose front-, four- or six-wheel drive! Unfortunately, no mechanical details were provided in our article, and we couldn’t dig up anything elsewhere. So we're not really sure how six-wheel drive would work here; a 4×4 Panda variant was introduced in 1983, so it would have presumably been a derivative of that.

Why build this Fiat freakshow in the first place? Well, why not? Car customizers tend to work with what’s available, and the Panda was (and still is) all over Europe. It spawned a whole lot of strange coachbuilt variants, but this six-wheeler is the strangest we’ve seen to date.

There’s very little information available about how many of these mutant Pandas were produced, at least on the English-language internet. Something tells us this might have been a one-off. But if the recent Mercedes-Benz AMG 6×6 is any indication, they might have sold more if they’d just charged six figures for it.

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