The only man fluent in both the marine and automotive worlds.
Cars and boats, in the same hands, for fifty years. That is the whole secret.
The founder
He has always built the coolest ride on the water. And the fastest.
Long before the WaterCar, Dave March ran the family boat on Lake Havasu – the one everyone at the ramp wanted a closer look at, quietly plumbed with a shot of nitrous. It turned heads like a weekend cruiser, and off the line it was the fastest thing on the water.
The race crews could never work out how a good-looking family boat kept pulling on them, run after run. The secret was a blue button on the wheel – one hit of nitrous and it walked away from boats built only to go fast. That was the whole idea: the coolest thing out there, and quietly the quickest. Boaters have a word for it: a sleeper. That instinct never left him, and it is exactly what the WaterCar is: a head-turner wherever it shows up, and more capable than anything that only looks the part.
Dave March
Founder
It could only have been born on one coastline.
A vehicle fluent in cars, boats, off-road suspension, composites, and the open ocean could only come from the one place fluent in all five at once. Within a few square miles of Southern California, five industries have spent seventy years leading the world – and the WaterCar is the one machine that needed every one of them.
Boat builders
Car designers
A capital of automotive design and hand-built coachwork – a mile from the shop, Metalcrafters built the Dodge Viper and Plymouth Prowler concepts Detroit unveiled under show lights.
Desert racers
Surfboard shapers
Sportfishers
Bob Leach
Founder of Eliminator Boats and the man they called “The Godfather of West Coast Custom Boating.” He set the look and the speed of an entire era of performance boats.
John Crean
Built Fleetwood Enterprises into the largest recreational-vehicle manufacturer in the world - a titan of American manufacturing.
Jack Cole
Founded Skipjack in 1966. His sportfishers were rugged enough to chase marlin in open ocean yet trailer to Baja - more than four thousand built.
Bill Poole
Built the first true long-range sportfishers, opening the deep banks off Baja to anyone willing to make the run.
Gil George
Founder of Funco, the legendary off-road buggy builder whose long-travel desert racers helped define the Baja 1000 and the dune-buggy era.
Bruce Meyers
Built the Meyers Manx in Fountain Valley - and, first, a fiberglass monocoque: a body that was its own frame. The WaterCar finishes that idea in welded aluminum.
King Shocks
Garden Grove shock builder and the official shock of SCORE International's Baja 1000. King machined custom sets to WaterCar's spec - the desert's hardest parts, a five-minute drive away.
The Gaffoglio family
Their Metalcrafters, a mile from the WaterCar shop, hand-built the concept and show cars Detroit revealed on its biggest stages - the Dodge Viper, the Plymouth Prowler.
It started with an instinct to build.
Dave grew up in the one stretch of coast fluent in cars, boats, engines, and open water – and he never stopped building. If it can drive, float, or fly, Dave has built it, improved it, or found a way to make it faster: across the automotive, marine, aviation, and manufacturing worlds, including Panther Jets, a marine jet-drive he built into a faster, more compact rival to the category leader.
That instinct found its subject in 1999, when Dave restored a 1964 Amphicar with his young son, Chad. Driving it, he felt the opening no one fluent in both worlds had ever taken – and set out to build the one that was genuinely great at both. That idea became a life’s work.
“Anybody can build a car that floats. Getting it to plane and run with stability, efficiency, and reliability is a whole different matter.”
He built the fastest one ever made - then aimed higher.
Each WaterCar generation added a new capability the last one didn’t have. The Python was the one that answered the performance question outright: a Guinness World Record at 72 mph on the water and 127 mph on land, the fastest amphibious vehicle ever built. The record still stands.
With the physics settled, Dave set his sights on the harder prize – the one a century of amphibious builders never reached: a machine you could register, service, and count on for years, not a showpiece but a boat a family would actually use. Every generation since has climbed toward that, and today’s WaterCar is where all of it comes together. It is the pinnacle – and the one people will remember as the amphibious vehicle that finally got it right.
Six machines. Each one answered what the last could not.
The Sports Car
Low, fast, unmistakably muscle-car. It proved the idea could move like something you’d actually want to drive.
02
The Gator
03
The Python
04
The Panther
05
The WaterCar H1
06
The WaterCar
Every generation, on the water and on the land.
Thirty miles of open Pacific.
In 2014, Dave drove a WaterCar out of the factory, through Orange County streets, into Newport Harbor, and thirty miles across open ocean to Catalina Island. Think of it as the American English Channel – the same kind of open-water crossing, only a farther distance. The first person in history to make it in an amphibious vehicle he built himself. Then he turned around and drove it home the same way.
“It was really a pretty pleasant crossing.”
Today the WaterCar is a family, and the standard is the same.
Dave is widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on amphibious vehicles – their design, their engineering, and the business of building and selling them. Twenty-eight patents. The only NMMA-certified amphibious vehicle manufacturer in the world. Five generations of hulls, each one refined on the water, not on paper.
Every machine that came before taught WaterCar what to build. What you can reserve today is the culmination of all of it.
RESERVE