Vickers Hover Rover

The Hover Rover was built by hovercraft maker Vickers-Armstrongs at its South Marston works near Swindon, in parallel with the company's full-size hovercraft programme of the early 1960s. It took a standard long-wheelbase Land Rover and added extended bodywork, lift fans and a large flexible skirt around the lower body. The skirt could be raised so the vehicle travelled normally on its wheels, or lowered so the air cushion carried most of the weight, leaving the lightly loaded wheels to provide traction and steering over soft ground. Vickers pitched the system as an aftermarket 'hovercraft conversion kit' that could in principle be fitted to any vehicle, and demonstrated it to the press at South Marston in April 1962; British Pathe filmed it skimming over rough, swampy ground the same year.

The application actually trialled was agricultural crop spraying, where the vehicle's minimal ground pressure promised to protect soft fields. It failed in practice: air escaping from the cushion scattered the spray uncontrollably, and the conversion's added machinery cut heavily into payload. The Hover Rover was never developed further, though Vickers kept it for a few years as a promotional curiosity for its larger hovercraft. Only the single demonstrator is documented, and its ultimate fate is not recorded in the sources consulted; period accounts differ on details such as whether the fans ran off the Land Rover's own engine (as bartiesworld.co.uk describes) or required a separate engine.