But the requirement for a rugged wheeled vehicle that can carry soldiers and supplies around battle zones never went away.

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It has certainly enraged Britain's Vickers, whose chairman, Sir Colin Chandler, alleges that the German defence ministry unfairly changed the specifications from a six-wheeled vehicle to an eight-wheeled one at the last moment.

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Designed by Matthew Humphries, the 3-Wheeler is modeled after the original three-wheeled vehicle that made Morgan famous a century ago.

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Another was Aptera, which hopes to produce a really wild-looking three-wheeled electric vehicle called the 2e (think of an airplane without wings).

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Raghavan does manage to describe excitedly the proceedings as the guerilla leaders ordered their men to "check all the IEDs they had set" and then detailed the guerillas' plot to attack a U.S. Army Stryker wheeled armored vehicle with heavy gunfire and an IED.

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What heinous crime were incandescent bulbs responsible for that they have been outlawed, when totally legally I can drink and smoke myself to death, have a cupboard full of guns, a chainsaw in the garage and an unstable two wheeled vehicle capable of delivering me to the crematorium at 200 mph?

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Someday an Airtrax-wheeled vehicle could carry helicopters precisely to and from a hangar or load explosives.

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The one new vehicle the service has managed to field in recent years, a wheeled troop carrier called Stryker, is an important addition to the mix of systems used in places like Afghanistan that the service will keep refining with better armor and electronics.

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The first wheeled vehicle to land on Mars was during NASA's 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission, which consisted of a stationary lander and a surface rover called Sojourner.

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