Snow Trac

The Snow Trac is a small personal Snowcat that is roughly the size of a modern compact car.

In 1954, Lars Larsson, the chief design engineer for a Swedish farm equipment company, AB Westeråsmaskiner, decided to develop a tracked vehicle to take him and his brother on fishing trips in the winter. The company put his snow vehicle into production in 1957. It uses a unique steering mechanism called a variator that allows the steering of a tracked vehicle to use a traditional automotive steering wheel instead of levers.

The Aktiv Fischer Snow Trac is a tracked vehicle, which was manufactured from 1957 to 1981 in Sweden. It runs on two rubber tracks powered by a Volkswagen flat 4 industrial boxer style engine and is suitable for both deep snow and soft surface use. The engine developed about 40 horsepower, but that varied from year to year as the earlier models developed 36 hp, and later models developed 54 hp. With a length of approximately 12' (3.6 meters) and width of 6'2" (1.9 meters) the vehicle is the size of a small car.

In the standard cabin configuration, only the driver is facing forward. The interior is equipped with side-facing bench seats and there are enough seats for 7 people (including the driver). The entrance is by a door attached at the tail. There are no other entrances, but many are equipped with a large sunroof, which could double as an emergency exit. Unlike most other snow vehicles, the Snow Trac uses a traditional steering wheel instead of levers. Early brochures describe it as follows: As easy to drive as a car.

While manufactured in Sweden, the Snow Trac proved to be a successful export and approximately 550 Snow Tracs were shipped to Alaska. At least 200 units were shipped to Canadian telephone utility Northwest Telephone in the Yukon Territory, Canada. Approximately 200 Snow Tracs ended up at the Canadian National Railway, and Snow Tracs were also located at each of the microwave sites along the length of the ALCAN (Alaska Canadian Highway). At least 400 more Snow Tracs were known to have been shipped to the Lower 48 states of the United States. At least 200 were known to have been shipped to Scotland.

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Wikipedia