Homemade Off-Road Cart Looks Like Sketchy Fun

If you guys need an idea for creative ways to hurt yourself, we have a great one for you today! This homebuilt dune buggy/go-cart looks reasonably safe at first glance, but when you see what is providing power, you just might change your mind about that.

The chassis looks to be pretty well built, with a full roll cage that should do well to protect the rider. Everything appears to be beefy steel bars that would hold up in even the most severe crashes, but personally, I wouldn’t want to find out the hard way that I was wrong.

However, the main attraction isn’t the chassis, but the awesome powerplant bolted into the frame rails. When I first heard it, I thought it was a two-stroke engine out of a quad, but upon further examination, its actually a single rotor Wankel engine, similar to what would be found under the hood of an RX7. As most of you already know, rotary engines are the exception to the rule in that they don’t have pistons, but instead rely on a spinning triangular rotor, hence their name.

Stock rotary engines make good power reliably, while modified versions, especially those fed by turbochargers like this one, can make some pretty huge power, but often sacrifice reliability in the name of going fast. Of course, that’s often the case with piston-driven engines as well, so it’s really not that that different in that aspect.

I hoped there would be some footage of this thing in action, but all we get, for now at least, is an idle video and some revs, which sound downright sinister. I don’t know what kind of power this thing makes, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this thing outrunning cars on the street and hitting some huge jumps off-road. As long as the driver can keep it upright, it should make for one heck of a good time!