Scorpion 4x4 Rock Crawling
Petersen's 4 WHEEL and OFF-ROAD - 2006
By Rick Pewe:
Writing about the best 4x4s ever is really quite easy. Picking them, however, is extremely difficult. Hopefully you’ve read the last “Best 4x4” stories in June, July, and August, where each staffer touted his best of the best and why. Of course, none of us totally agree on this subject, just like the wheeling world at large. If that was true, no one would drive brand X, and we would all drive brand Y. Naturally this would lead to a very boring world, and real-world wheeling would come to an and as we know it. So how it’s my turn to reveal my picks and why I think these vehicles are truly the best 4x4s of all time. You all won’t agree with me, and some of you may say I’m just a crazy old coot who’s stuck in the ‘60s, but nothing could be further from the truth. I’m actually stuck in a wide variety of eras and epochs which give me the insight to analyze correctly what you should be thinking as well. OK, that’s a bunch of blarney. I just like the vehicles I am now presenting. And hope you do to.
Rick Pewe on the Scorpion Rock Crawler
Yes, it's been said before, after, and during any conversation about wheeling: Tube buggies either suck or rule, and often do both at the same time. Soni Honneger's visionary Scorpion 4x4 helped fuel the rage of tube buggy building, if not starting it outright. While my other picks are from major OEMs, I picked the Scorpion 4x4 as a (semi) regular production vehicle, at least that's the theory so I'm sticking with it. Built from standard components and being a true multifunctional on- and off-road vehicle, the Scorpion directly influenced the wheeling world as we know it today. And don't think that the Big 3 (or whatever the number is today) hasn't looked at the rig and analyzed many of its performance and design characteristics. So have plenty of tube buggy aficionados who copy, steal, reinvent, and improve around Soni's basic design and concept.
MOTORTREND on SCORPION TUBE BUGGY CRAZE
The Legendary Scorpion Raock Crawler
"One of the first real tube buggies was the Scorpion made by Soni Honegger, ... We featured it in "Swiss Army Knife" way back in the August '97 issue, nearly 10 years ago. At the time I was a fresh feature editor, many of our readers were in grade school, and David Freiburger was our Editor, and gave us some of his musings in his 4xForward ("The Most Capable 4x4 Ever") in that issue. It's interesting enough that I felt we should share a shortened version of it with you a decade later, in case you're wondering how the tube-buggy craze started."
Read the article here:
https://www.motortrend.com/features/131-0608-august-2006-4xforward-tube-buggies
HOT ROD MAGAZINE
David Freiburger
"Then came 1997 and Soni Honegger's Scorpion Mk1 (see www.scorpion4x4.com). It may not have been the very first full-tube-chassis trail rig built entirely of imagination and with zero OE chassis components and no bodywork, but it was the most capable and radical of the time, and it started a revolution. All of a sudden, 4x4 shops were cranking out what became known as rock buggies. Where the Scorpion was large and small-tired by today's standards, the newer rock buggies kept getting smaller, lighter, faster, and more capable of attacking larger and hairier obstacles."