League Of Extraordinary Six Wheel Captain Nemo Car Replica – Video
The Spirit Of Nemo Is The Wildest Car You’ve Ever Seen. Ezra Dyer takes in the wildest six-wheel custom League Of Extraordinary in all of the Carolinas.
League Of Extraordinary Six Wheel Captain Nemo Car
Designed by Carol Spier, who also penned Captain Nemo’s Nautilus for the movie, the four-door six-wheeled fiberglass-bodied 22-foot-long Nemo car (some sources call it the Nautilus car, others the Nemomobile) was built on a Land Rover fire tender chassis with an extra axle up front and a Land Rover V-8 engine for power, a removeable hardtop, and elaborate Hindu decoration, particularly on the front and interior of the car. Two were reportedly built for the production, though the studio fitted one of the two with extensive rigging for interior shots.
Like the original, the body that Freeman built for the car was made from fiberglass, though his measures 24 feet long and a little narrower than the original at 102 inches. The decorative work he created himself first by sculpting it out of Spanish clay, then taking molds and casting the end result “in aluminum filled resins and cold-cast plated in aluminum and pewter, and further trimmed in bronze, brass, and 18k gold,” he wrote.
The Nemo car used in filming has since made its way to the United Kingdom (and, in fact, last year went up for auction but didn’t sell against a pre-auction estimate of £40,000 to £60,000, or about $60,000 to $90,000), leaving little but repeated viewings to inspire and guide Freeman’s build. Rather than a Land Rover, Freeman said he started with a pair of 1979 Cadillac Fleetwood limousines which he then combined into one chassis, powered by a Cadillac 425-cu.in. V-8 and Turbo-Hydramatic 400 automatic transmission driving the rear wheels.
Freeman, a body shop owner from West End, North Carolina, said he put about 6,500 hours of work into the car—which he calls the Spirit of Nemo—over the last 4-1/2 years, interrupted at one point by a shop fire that took out his molds. Undaunted, he recently finished the car, calling it “more art than automobile” and claiming it to be the first and only replica of the Nemo car. He plans to take the wraps off his replica May 2 at the Pinehurst Concours d’Elegance in Pinehurst, North Carolina.