Amphibious Hydra Spyder breaks ground by going fast on water

RIDGELAND, S.C. — It's not terribly easy to parallel park an automobile on a lake.

John Giljam knows this to be as true as the highway is long, and for good reason: He's tried to park his car on a lake — and on rivers and ponds. Giljam, in fact, has practiced not only parking on water; he's become quite adept at turning sharply on it.

And he's mastered the art of steering clear of critters, geese mostly. It helps to learn these feats in his latest creation, the "Hydra Spyder," an amphibious car that cruises on water as easily as it does on blacktop.

With its snazzy snout, convertible top, Corvette V8 engine and jet "impeller" — the stainless-steel cone protruding from the rear that propels it through water — the Hydra Spyder is poised to become the first mass-produced amphibious automobile in America.

"It's incredibly nimble in the water. The Spyder turns smoothly, docks easily," the 46-year-old inventor boasts. It has one shortcoming. "The parallel parking really sucks."

Giljam tingles at the idea of anglers taking their cars out on lakes to fish; of rush-hour commuters bypassing congestion by taking a river as an alternate route.

At 39, Giljam had invented and patented the world's first unsinkable bus and the world's first aquatic, luxury RV. Producing amphibious cars on a grand scale would be, as he sees it, a "logical" new endeavor.

His Hydra Spyder is not the first of its kind. Civilian, amphibious vehicles have been around for more than a century, and European manufacturers have dominated the trade.

Yet, nearly all have been agonizingly slow in the wet, where wheels create drag.

Giljam's Cool Amphibious Manufacturers International, which he founded with his wife, Julie, in 1999, turned out amphibious buses at a Rochester, N.Y., factory, mainly for purchase by tour operators.

Today at his factory in South Carolina, sitting in a corner is the lemon-yellow, fiberglass Hydra Spyder — the prototype, actually. It sold in November for $175,000.

A nondisclosure agreement protects the identity of the buyer, one of the wealthiest people in America — a "Forbes Top-50 kinda guy," from the West Coast, Giljam says, who took delivery before the Giljams could test it at a motor speedway.

They did test the prototype in the water. Moments after rolling the Hydra Spyder smoothly off a dock in Bluffton, S.C., Giljam remembers, "a lady came running pell-mell down the dock, screaming: 'Don't worry! We've called 911!' "

And, for the record, how good is it on gas?

On land, somewhere around 16 to 18 miles per gallon of premium gas.

It's difficult to determine mpg in the water. "When you put it in the water, you burn a lot more fuel and the odometer doesn't move. Tires don't rotate in the water, you know," he says.