Thornycroft Hathi

The Thornycroft Hathi was an early four-wheel-drive lorry built by Thornycroft in the 1920s and used by the British Army as an artillery tractor. Its name is the Hindi word for elephant, and it suited the heavy, wide-bonneted look of the machine. Because Britain had developed few four-wheel-drive vehicles during the First World War and there was no commercial demand for them afterwards, the army built its own: a prototype made in 1922 by P Company of the Royal Army Service Corps training college at Aldershot, using parts of a German Erhardt tractor. Thornycroft built the production models, 25 of them in 1924. They used an 11.3 litre six-cylinder petrol engine and a complex bevel-gear drive through the steering joints of the front axle, which made the Hathi expensive and demanding to maintain. It was soon overtaken by six-wheeled 6x4 lorries that gave similar cross-country performance more cheaply. Eight went to Australia in 1925, and a single example survives in the REME Museum collection.