One of the four Pontiac Trans Ams modified to play the part of KITT in the seventies television series, Knight Rider, is up for sale. If you’re into collecting specials, this could be for you, provided you have a spare $150,000 floating around, of course. It is not street legal and is most likely to go to a collection, therefore.

It does have the fancy red scanning light at the front but the rest of the gear is mostly for show only. And David Hasselhoff isn’t part of the deal, although I’m not sure whether that’s a plus or a minus.

Here’s a strange one - the Tatra 603. Made in Czechoslovakia, the 603 was actually well before its time when first designed in the fifties. The company has been going strong for almost as long as Benz, although they gave up making cars in the nineties, preferring to concentrate on their successful truck range.

But Tatra began its tradition of rear-engined vehicles in the thirties, even Dr Ferdinand Porsche “borrowing” heavily from Tatra designs in the design of his Volkswagen. The 603 was one of these rear-engined curiosities.

But the uniqueness of the 603 does not end with its unusual positioning of the power plant. The engine was an air-cooled 2.5 liter V8! Okay, it only produced 95 bhp but imagine all that weight swinging around behind the back axle. The handling was spectacular at speed as a result - but it did not matter too much since only the top party officials and factory managers could afford to have one. They were interested in luxury rather than performance and the 603 delivered in that area.

Those Czechs know how to put together a good car, in spite of the undeserved reputation of the old Skodas, and Tatra was no exception. The company holds a number of impressive records, as well as Dr Porsche’s respect - it is the third oldest car manufacturer in the world and was the first to introduce a body influenced by aerodynamics.

I do like the oddities of the automotive world and they don’t come much odder than the cars produced by the German DKW company. For a start, they were committed to the two-stroke engine and all their cars had the familiar clatter of that engine. Not content with that, they were the first to build a three-cylinder engine and it was used in almost all of their their cars.

Why two-stroke and why three cylinders? I would have to guess that they just liked being different. But it was a very effective difference - their engines were so light that they proved very handy in competition vehicles and DKW was a big name in rallying in the 50s. There was a strong rumor at the time that DKW stood for Deutches Kleine Wunder (little German wonder), a fitting enough accolade to the car and more accurate than the real meaning: Dampf-Kraft Wagen (steam-powered vehicle).

The car I remember from the early sixties was their 1000S, a fairly normal-looking family saloon, apart from that distinctive racket from the engine, of course. The Deek was common in Africa at the time and, even today, there is a thriving fanbase in South Africa. But the multiplicity of models and variants were to prove too much for the company to support; in 1964 they were absorbed by the Volkswagen Group and they ceased production of one of the most idiosyncratic cars on the road.

Many of these strange adventures in the automotive world were to prove ahead of their time. The two-stroke engine has been killed off by clean emissions legislation but the idea of odd-numbered cylinders has been reborn and lives again in the many five-cylinder engines of today. So it is good that we should remember DKW and the German engineers who insisted on doing things differently. The Wikipedia has a very good history of the company for those who are interested.

Many years ago I saw a TV program that included automotive design exercises by young Japanese employees of car manufacturers. There were some fascinating ideas on display but the one that caught my eye was the single-wheel vehicle. Not a motorized unicycle, you understand, no, a much cleverer idea that seated the driver inside the wheel.

Whether it should be termed a car or a motorbike is open to debate but it seemed a suitably dreamlike subject for this blog. I searched the net for anything on the design and came up with a car in India that was at drawing board stage only, a few pictures of unicycles, but nothing resembling what I remembered or even using the same idea.

Then I thought that it might be described as a motorbike and tried that. Bingo! Not the design I had seen but the identical idea actually put into practice; in fact, a brief movie of some guy demonstrating the contraption. The machine is more obviously a motorbike than the Japanese version but it is just as pretty a concept and, wonder of wonders, it works!

You can see the thing in action by clicking on this link. It looks highly dangerous when moving but what really worries me is what happens when it stops. If I remember correctly, the Japanese design had some sort of arrangement to prevent it tipping over at rest but I can see nothing similar on this one. Perhaps the idea is to wait until nearly at a full stop, then leap off and run for your life!

Obviously, this idea is not entirely practical - the wheel gets in the way of your forward vision for a start - but, being the sucker for clever ideas that I am, I just had to show it to you.