A six-wheeled, amphibious ATV with side-by-side seating and a Honda engine swap is sitting on Facebook Marketplace in Oklahoma right now, asking $3,000. It sounds like a fever dream. It’s actually a relic from a forgotten era when floating across a pond was just another thing your off-roader did on a Saturday.
The machine is an Attex 6×6, a brand most people under 50 have never heard of. Before Honda’s three-wheelers and the four-wheelers that followed, six wheels and buoyancy were standard equipment in the ATV world. Attex was one of dozens of small American manufacturers building these things, and this particular survivor has outlasted nearly all of them.
The seller claims the original engine has been swapped for a four-stroke Honda mill, which is both ironic and practical. Ironic because Honda is the company that destroyed Attex’s market. Practical because Honda small engines are famously unkillable. The owner says it has enough torque to spin 180s on trails and enough grunt to move trailers and boats around a property.
Steering works like a tank — brake the wheels on one side, and the whole machine pivots. No steering wheel, no rack and pinion, just differential braking across six driven wheels. It makes the thing absurdly maneuverable in tight spaces and reasonably controllable in water, where the chunky tires act as rudimentary paddles.
The Attex story is a strange one. The company was founded in 1967 by David McCahill, an heir to the Maytag washing machine fortune who wanted to sell Amphicat ATVs but couldn’t get inventory. So he and a friend named Roger Flannery designed their own.
The first Attex was reportedly a near-copy of the Amphicat, but the company grew more ambitious over time. They eventually fielded vehicles in the NORRA Baja 500, built an electric model called the Electrica, and supplied an 8×8 variant to the U.S. military for tank driver training.
That ambition wasn’t enough. Honda launched the ATC90 three-wheeler in 1970, offering a cheaper, simpler, more refined alternative to the lumbering six-wheelers. The 1973 oil crisis squeezed margins further.
Then in 1975, Attex lost access to the Borg-Warner T-20 transmission — the gearbox that powered most American 6×6 ATVs — when rival companies Recreatives and Hustler Corporation bought the rights. That was the kill shot.
Attex changed hands multiple times and reportedly trickled out a few machines into the early 1990s before going silent for good. It joined a graveyard of small American ATV makers that couldn’t compete with Japanese engineering, Japanese pricing, and Japanese distribution networks.
Which makes this particular machine’s Honda engine swap feel like a quiet surrender. The brand that helped put Attex out of business now keeps this one running. The seller isn’t dwelling on that history — they’re just trying to move a weird, wonderful machine that can cross a creek and haul a boat.
Three grand for a running, swimming, six-wheeled piece of American off-road history with a bulletproof Japanese heart. The ATV market moved on decades ago, but machines like this Attex are reminders that it didn’t always move in the right direction. Modern UTVs are faster, safer, and more comfortable. None of them float.
Share this Story