Up until the 1950s, half-tracked vehicles cars or trucks (with two front wheels at the front and caterpillar tracks at the rear) were quite popular as military vehicles. The Allies alone built something like 50,000 M3 Half-Tracks during WWII and the Germans had their own half-tracked vehicles as well.
But after that, everyone seemed to have collectively lost interest in them. I realise with around 50,000 units produced there probably wasn’t a need to make any more of them, but even so.
So, what happened to half-tracks as a vehicle design?
They were replaced either by fully tracked APCs like the M75, M59 and eventually the ubiquitous M113; they had the advantages of having overhead coverage for the passengers, being amphibious capable for river crossing, and well, being fully tracked or by fully wheeled APCs such as the most of the Soviet BTR series and the French VAB which also had overhead cover and were usually amphibious.
ETA: It’s not really that hard to learn to learn to drive a tracked vehicle where steering is accomplished by differential track speed. It also gives the added advantage of not having a turning radius; tracked vehicles can pivot to infinity by putting one track in forward drive and the other in reverse at the same speed.
Seems to me (with no knowledge in the field, please be kind) that tracks provide two advantages: added traction and ability to cross chasms, ditches, etc. in proportion to the length of the caterpillar tract. A vehicle with wheels in front basically loses the latter advantage because the wheels can still get stuck.
And I can imagine that tracked vehicles don’t provide much of a traction advantage on paved roads, are probably slower than normal trucks, and will probably cause damage to the road itself.
So, in the mid-20th century, as nations developed paved highway networks that could be used to move vehicles around, it became less attractive to use tracked trucks that would need to be loaded onto normal trucks for ferrying.
Tracked vehicles also damage themselves, in a sense – tracks wear out pretty fast compared to standard tires. “Throwing a track” is a pretty common problem for tankers.
Consider a truck wheel might have a footprint of, oh 16 square inches x 4 wheels = 64 square inches. Now consider a crawler track having a footprint of maybe 20 square feet. They do quite well on paved & unpaved surfaces. And despite weighing a lot, they distribute that weight over the entire track surface which yields a significantly lower weight per square inch than a weeled vehicle. That means, when you get your hummer stuck to the floorboards in muck, any old tracked vehicle can waddle on out into the bog, chain you up and haul you out no problem.
Not quite. A snowmobile requires a large traction footprint, given it rides on snow. A half-track would be quite happily at home on any road driven by a wheeled vehicle.
This company has them for trucks, ATVs and even trailers too. Pretty much anything with wheels and enough space in the wheel wells for them I guess. These aren’t half tracks though, they are just neat, although there’s probably nothing preventing a person from only installing two of them and making a half track.
