This Absurd Car Is Really A Truck With Fabric-Covered Body Panels And Wild Pop-Open Doors

There was once a Wisconsin man who had an obsession with combining automobile safety and luxury. Bruce Baldwin Mohs liked to invent lots of things, but he’s perhaps best remembered for two wonderfully crazy cars. The Mohs Ostentatienne Opera Sedan was as long as a van, as heavy as a pickup truck, and had absurd ideas for safety. Then there was this, the Mohs SafariKar. It’s just one of three cars built to be the ultimate hunting vehicle, with International Harvester Travelall bones, an aluminum structure, Naugahyde synthetic leather for skin, and wild doors that slide open. Guess what? You now have an opportunity to own one.

This car has actually been for sale for two years, but it’s making the Internet rounds again. The vehicle’s seller is also making an effort to get rid of the thing. This SafariKar was listed for an astounding $150,000, but now the seller wants it gone for $95,000. That’s still a lot of money, but this is a truly weird prototype car — one that you’ll almost certainly never see again.

If you think this vehicle looks ginormous in photos, you’re not wrong. I’ve seen one of these in person at Historic Auto Attractions in Illinois last year. It really is a big old International Harvester SUV trying its absolute hardest to be a luxury convertible car.

That museum’s SafariKar is not the one above, so you’re looking at one of the other three known to exist. But let’s step back and talk about the person silly enough to convert an SUV into a car.

The Wizard of Wisconsin

This car was the creation of one Bruce Baldwin Mohs. A lot of people have dreams and inventions rattling around their head, but not the resources to make them happen. Mohs had a lot of weird ideas, and he made sure to make as many of them as real as possible, no matter how offbeat they were.

Here’s a bit of backstory from when I visited Historic Auto Attractions:

A 1981 issue of the Washington Post notes that Mohs was an inventor from a young age and he had a love for motorized contraptions. He was born in 1932 in Madison, Wisconsin, to parents with impressive resumes. His father helped invent the detonation device for a 1,000-pound bomb used in World War I. His mother was an architect. Together, the parents built an empire of sorts in Madison and they were reportedly responsible for a number of the structures built in the city in the era.

This clearly rubbed off on young Bruce Mohs. As a kid, he built rockets and sold them to other kids. Apparently, some of those rockets caught fire, which motivated Mohs to think about ways to make things safer. As the Washington Post writes, Mohs built his first vehicle at 9 years old when he took a three-horsepower engine from his father’s cement mixer and bolted it to a wagon. Mohs’ interest in cars was catapulted when he was 12. For his 12th birthday, Mohs’ father gave him a 1920 Falls 8 racer, a vehicle that was originally built as an Indy racer. Two years later, Mohs got into motorcycles and he built his first scooter.

This kicked off an entire lifetime of inventing where Mohs would create something, get a patent, and license those patents out to manufacturers. A lot of his inventions would have a safety aspect to them. For example, one of Mohs’ inventions was a chemical process patent used in covering television tubes to prevent them from exploding. That invention actually started as an idea to keep car taillights from breaking so easily. In his experiments, Mohs accidentally discovered a new way to bond plastic and glass. As a result, when a tube television falls onto the floor (or you put your foot through it) you can be safe from a total explosion.

Mohs has put his name on so many objects that I’m not sure he’s ever had any free time. Here, let’s just have a lightning round of what he’s made: Mohs built a rubber-track snowmobile, a scooter that weighed just 40 pounds, aluminum bicycle pedals, aircraft parts, a rotating baby stroller, electric scooters, small motorcycles, bicycle sidecars, key cases, and a sidecar motorcycle sidecar that deployed a small boat. Oh, I’m not done yet! He’s also responsible for the instant milkshake, the Reflecto-strip, a working 31-foot scale model of the battleship Wisconsin, the Mohs Tailgate, the Mohs Industrial Sidecar, and so much more.

Mohs somehow found time to do other things that didn’t involve inventing. He eventually inherited his parents’ hotel, restaurant, and real estate empire, giving him businesses to run. Mohs had a previous business sense from his time in the Air Force. He purchased a Cessna 185 floatplane and ran a charter service in Wisconsin. Mohs also liked helicopters and became Wisconsin’s first certified commercial helicopter pilot. The Mohs Seaplane Corporation was created for his aviation exploits, but to also host so many of his inventions.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate the eccentricity is by looking at what the cars Mohs designed.

A Rolls-Royce For Hunting

Mohs was obsessed with car safety. This was shown in the mid-1960s when Mohs began designing the Ostentatienne Opera Sedan (shown above), a car designed to be, quote: “A totally new concept, the Mohs shares no components or design philosophy with any other car. Nitrogen-filled tires are standard, but the 549-cubic-inch engine is optional for those owners who demand the impossible and expect the improbable.”

The Ostentatienne Opera Sedan was designed to be the safest and most luxurious car on the road with absurd ideas like seats that swiveled and leaned with centrifugal force and massive tires designed to stay cool in the summer. I wrote about that car last year, so you should click here to take an adventure. It’s worth the read! Today, we’re going to be talking about the next car destined to fill the Mohs Seaplane Corporation car lineup. Oh yeah, these cars had nothing to do with planes, but they were sold under the Mohs aviation arm.

Unlike the Ostentatienne, the Mohs SafariKar was not supposed to be the safest car in the world.

Instead, Mohs envisioned this vehicle as a luxurious way to get the perfect shot every time while hunting. But, Mohs also advertised this vehicle as being one requiring minimal maintenance and that was even more “conservative” than a Rolls-Royce.

Here, let Mohs do the talking. It’s hilarious that brochures for the SafariKar weren’t produced until after the three examples were built:

Seldom, if ever, in the annals of automotive advertising, is the literature of a new car published after cessation of production. Collectors of rare and unusual cars appreciate the Mohs SafariKar limited production dual-cowl phaeton metal-top convertible — for its uniqueness and fresh new ideas. The double entry, linear shaft and bushing operated doors, completely devoid of hinges are unique and useful; especially safe! The Mohs body construction method utilizing cast Tenzalloy bulkheads, heavy gauge aluminum sheet, polyurethane foam and Naugahyde covering is not only quiet in the extreme, but low in maintenance since there is no paint on the exterior of the car. You merely wet, wipe and dry for cleaning. No waxing. No polishing.

All of that is pretty wild, so let’s address it. The SafariKar was built in 1973 and uses a 1969 International Harvester Travelall SUV as a base vehicle. The vehicle is largely Travelall underneath, including the SUV’s 392 cubic-inch V8 and automatic transmission. This engine was good for 236 HP and 315 lb-ft of torque. Thankfully, I am talking about net numbers, here.

Mohs changed the rest of the SUV for his wild project. The vehicle features tungsten alloy bulkheads, and the body panels are aluminum. However, Mohs didn’t want to give the vehicle a typical body, so those aluminum panels have thick foam on top of them and Naugahyde on top of that.

As I said before, I got to look around one of these cars a year ago and frankly, it looks unreal in person. The foam covering is at least an inch thick, and it’s still hard to understand just why Naugahyde covers so much of the body. Mohs talks up the padding as a way to make the vehicle incredibly quiet and soft to the touch, but I continue to wonder if the padding would have been better inside (though for pedestrians, maybe outside is the move?). I also wonder how the padding would have looked like after 10 years of Wisconsin summers and winters.

Now we move to the doors, which slide out for entry and exit. These aren’t like a minivan’s doors, which slide back, but giant panels that slide out. Mohs says this was done to eliminate hinges and in the name of safety, but I’m not sure how a door designed like this is safer.

Safety played another large role in the vehicle’s seats. The vehicles have the Mohs patented “swing and sway” seats. These seats swivel and lean with centrifugal force. This was supposed to help the vehicle remain comfortable in curves and supposedly would negate the need for additional safety equipment as they tilted to a horizontal position during a crash. The idea was that the seats would feel as smooth in a curve as a plane in coordinated flight, so you would arrive safe and without fatigue.

Of course, the SafariKar was built with hunting in mind, so the aluminum roof rolled back by hand to create an open-top vehicle. Occupants could then use the swiveling seats to help point themselves to get the perfect shot. The vehicle’s rear window also folded down to become a table for eating at a drive-in, or perhaps to examine your latest kill.

Mohs wanted all of this to be wrapped up in the ultimate luxury experience, so features included a rear seat that turned into a bed, a passenger vanity, a radio, carpet, air-conditioning, and a butane-fired furnace for those cold hunts.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you look at it, the SafariKar never reached production. Tightening EPA regulations are often reported to be the blame, but it sounds like the true reason remains unknown. Still, Mohs managed to build three prototypes before giving up on the SafariKar. 

Before I move on, we have to laugh at the spec sheet. Mohs said the car weighed 5,400 pounds, which makes sense given its off-road SUV roots. We get sleeping capacity like an RV, which is said to be two adults and two children. Then we see the horsepower rating, which Mohs describes as “adequate.” Oh, and seating capacity is somehow eight people. Mohs expected three people to sit up front, three people to sit in the rear, and two more in jump seats in the middle. Finally, we stop at the price, which would have been $14,500 in 1973 money, or $106,901 in today’s cash.

This Mohs SafariKar

That leads us to the SafariKar that’s been for sale for the past couple of years.

The vehicle was subject to a comprehensive restoration which saw the SafariKar worked from top to bottom. The seats were upholstered in vinyl while 14 yards of carpet were laid down to cover the massive vehicle. The restorers fired off 2,700 aluminum rivets and 7,000 stainless steel staples during the restoration. Other fun facts offered by the listing are the use of 40 cans of spray adhesive for the new body panel foam, 40 yards of vinyl for the car’s skin, and 196 feet of thin wood strips somewhere in the vehicle’s structure.

The ideas here are wild, and it’s interesting to see how Mohs thought this vehicle was doing something unheard of. Unfortunately, his seats were made unnecessary by crumple zones and airbags while interior sound deadening allows the cars of today to have attractive bodies, rather than the kind of thing you’d see in a horror movie. Further, 1973 was the exact wrong time to try to sell a vehicle supposedly as unique as a Cadillac Eldorado with the engine, weight, and thirst of a large SUV.

As I said earlier, the seller originally wanted $150,000 for this restored vehicle, but has thus far gotten no bites. I’m not that surprised. It’s a vehicle that couldn’t be driven and it’s so obscure that nobody really knows what it is. Still, I hope someone finds their way out to Kingston, Pennsylvania to give the SafariKar a new home.