Remember when you were a kid, flinging your radio controlled car off a home-made jump in your driveway and thinking how great it would be to shrink down to one fifth of your size and drive the thing from the inside? Well now you can, though there’s no need to scale down, because the Wild One has scaled up, to 1:1. And it’s fully road legal.
Technically, the Wild One Max is bigger than 1:1, because the firm behind it, Britain’s Little Car Company – the guys responsible for the half-sized Bugatti Type 35, Ferrari Testarossa and Aston DB5 – listened to customer feedback to the prototype revealed in 2021, and introduced some important changes.
Those include changing the design of the front suspension towers to improve visibility, swapping trailing arms for double wishbones and boosting the performance, but the most significant is the widening of the body by 4 inches (100 mm) to accommodate two seats, instead of one.
So the production car isn’t an exact replica of the Tamiya kit first released in 1985, but it’s close enough that anyone who remembers the original will instantly recognize it. And even if it’s not quite capable as scale versions of the crazy stunts you might have subjected the original to, it’s not without some off-road credentials.
Fourteen-inch Maxis off-road tires help maximize the traction of the rear-wheel drive chassis, there’s 10.6 inches (270 mm) of ground clearance and the 28.4 and 50.8-degree breakover and departure angles look good, even if the 34.1-degree approach number isn’t quite as hot. On the inside – what there is of it – you’ll find Cobra bucket seats, four-point harnesses and an IP-rated, weather-protected 5-inch digital screen with marine-spec switches.
The 100 Launch Edition cars are powered by eight removable battery packs making up 14.4 kWh of energy storage and the firm says the 1,100 lbs (500 kg) buggy can hit 60 mph (96 km/h). That’s double what the original LCC Wild One prototype was capable of, will probably make the optional windshield desirable and also make driving it feel less dangerous when you stray from the desert and onto the high street.
More than nine out of every 10 deposit holders said they’d like to be able to use their Max on the road, so the Launch Edition cars sold in the UK and Europe will also come with a kit that allows that by taking advantage of the same quadricycle rules that cover the Citroen Ami and Renault Twizy.
First deliveries won’t happen until 2024, but the Wild One Max will get a full public unveiling later this year when we’ll learn more about prices, range and acceleration. Don’t know about you, but I’d love to see this face off against an original 1:10 Wild One. Who’s your money on?
