When Petr Beneda drove his boxy antipodean ute onto the service station forecourt in the Czech town of Bakov nad Jizerou, the attendant already knew what it was. "Is that farm vehicle from Australia or New Zealand?" he picked correctly, falling short of knowing the Trekka marque and that only its badge was made in Australia; the rest was made in Aotearoa.
That awareness highlights the extraordinary rise in prominence in the Czech Republic of a vehicle significantly forgotten and still mocked in the country that built it. Nearly six decades earlier, the Trekka first rolled off the assembly line in Ōtāhuhu, Auckland.
In December 1966, the Trekka became New Zealand's first and only home-designed and mass-produced motor vehicle. A total of 2500 examples of it were built over six years. The boxy Trekka looked a bit like an undernourished Land Rover and featured a locally designed and built body fitted to the chassis and underpinnings of a Škoda Octavia.
A rough concept vehicle had been built by Palmerston North Škoda importer Phil Andrews. That was bought, along with the Škoda franchise, by Auckland car assembler Motor Holdings, which put it in production in Ōtāhuhu.
It was the ultimate expression of government policies to restrict imports through a comprehensive licensing system and to incentivise the local car assembly industry by loosening import restrictions for vehicles with a high local content, such as glass, upholstery, and so on.
It was the marriage of Kiwi industrial can-do with Cold War-era Czechoslovakia that lies behind the Trekka's rise to fame in Škoda's homeland over the past five years.
Škoda, whose car-making reaches back to 1905, was first proud of and then indifferent to its 1960s and 70s foray into New Zealand, but in recent years has reconnected with that chapter in its history and its global public relations potential in the 21st century.
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