The name alone is intriguing: Fat Truck. Add a muscular bulky appearance that supports the name, and you have the makings of a crowd generator at the recent Associated Equipment Distributors Summit in Orlando.
Owner Zeal Motor out of Bromont, Quebec, Canada, calls the Fat Truck “an industrial off-road utility vehicle specifically designed for the transportation of personnel and materials in difficult terrain.”
“It’s totally amphibious, it goes up a 35-degree hill and it travels 25 miles per hour,” says Amine Khimjee, Zeal Motor vice president sales and marketing. (For more specs, see the chart below.)
The joystick-steered unit currently comes in three versions: an 8-person crew cab, a pickup with a small dump bed, and a pickup with a box bed. The automatic tire inflation system responds to operator inputs. For instance, when an operator is in mud, he can press a button on the joystick and the tires will deflate to offer maximum traction. If the machine is traveling in water, the operator can press another button and the tires will inflate to maximum. Either person sitting in the two front seats can operate the vehicle since the joystick is positioned between them.
“This is an extreme low ground pressure tire,” Khimjee explains. “The pressure will never go higher than 4 psi.” This means the near 5,000-pound machine on has a ground pressure of 1 psi when the unit is empty and 1.6 psi when it is fully loaded. The four 1640x640x610 tires give users a combined 8,000 pounds of flotation.
