Scottorn 6x6 Range Rover Conversions

Engine

3.5-litre Rover V8 (Range Rover base)

Drive

6x6, driven third axle

Built

4 completed

Origin

Scottorn Trailers, New Malden, Surrey

Most six-wheeled Range Rovers were fire engines. The Scottorn conversions were something else entirely: stretched two-door Range Rovers with a driven third axle, built by a Surrey trailer firm whose whole business was making extra axles pull their weight. Four were completed. No more.

The company behind the conversions

Scottorn Trailers Ltd operated from Victor Works on Kingston Road in New Malden, Surrey, and traded as part of the Boughton group of engineering companies. Its speciality was the powered trailer: a trailer carrying a Land Rover axle and differential, driven through a power take-off and a propeller shaft from the towing vehicle, so that an ordinary 4x4 became a six-wheel-drive train. Scottorn’s brochure for its Bushmaster powered trailer sold exactly that idea, offering the unit as a cargo carrier, a portable generator, a 200-gallon fluid tank, a welder or a compressor, all of it pushed along by its own driven axle. The coupling was the clever part, articulating 60 degrees in every direction so the drive kept working over broken ground.

The firm developed powered-trailer systems for the Series IIA 109 and later for the military 101 Forward Control, which was designed from the outset to drive a trailing axle. Turning that expertise inward, from a trailer behind the vehicle to a third axle within it, produced the six-wheel Range Rover.

Four cars, and only four

Testimony from former Scottorn production staff and from surviving owners agrees on the count: four 6x6 Range Rovers were finished. A fifth is said to have been started and then cut back into a standard two-door 4x4 before completion, though that detail rests on employee recollection rather than paperwork. The numbering adds its own confusion. Chassis plates ran to 004, but 001 was reportedly never used, so the plate numbers and the build order do not line up neatly.

The first three cars carried selectable drive, letting the driver choose 6x2, 6x4 or full 6x6. The fourth was converted to permanent six-wheel drive and served as the company’s own promotional vehicle. Each conversion involved stretching the Range Rover body between the front and rear seats and grafting in the additional driven axle using the powered-axle hardware Scottorn already built for its trailers.

Not to be confused with the 6x4 fire appliances

Six-wheel Range Rovers are usually assumed to be Carmichael Commandos, and the assumption is fair on the numbers. Carmichael of Worcester extended the two-door Range Rover by 775 mm and added a third axle, producing roughly 400 six-wheel conversions between 1971 and the mid-1990s, most of them airport rapid-intervention fire vehicles. The RAF and Royal Navy TACR2 crash-rescue trucks were built on the Commando chassis, with bodies by Carmichael, Gloster Saro and a small number by HCB Angus.

The distinction matters. On the Commando, the added rear axle is unpowered, a trailing axle on coil springs, so the vehicle is a 6x4. Scottorn’s cars drove all three axles. That makes them, by a comfortable margin, the rarest configuration of the classic Range Rover in six-wheel form.

Survivors

At least two of the four are known to exist today. One has been restored in the UK by an enthusiast owner, and the last car built is reported to be in France. Given that the base vehicles were ordinary two-door Range Rovers underneath, survival depended less on mechanical exotica than on someone recognising what they had. Scottorn Trailers itself is long gone, and with it went most of the build records, which is why so much of the story now depends on the people who were there.