Somewhere between a muscle car and a sightseeing tour, there is a five-seater V8 trike parked in the Octagon with heated seats and no roof. Experience Dunedin has been running trike tours around the city and Otago Peninsula for years now, and most Dunedinites still have no idea it exists. We went for a ride.
A Hundred and Thirty Grand of Christchurch Engineering
What You Are Actually Sitting On
The first thing you notice is that it has no business being this big. Parked outside the Art Gallery in the Octagon, the trike looks like something escaped from a custom car show and decided to offer sightseeing tours. It is built around a 350 cubic inch Chevrolet V8 – the same engine that powered muscle cars in the 1970s – and it weighs well over a tonne. Five seats, heated bucket seats with seatbelts, USB ports for your phone, and a rear end wide enough that pedestrians step off the footpath to let it pass.
The whole thing was built by a specialist trike maker in Christchurch. It cost around $130,000 and it is classified as a car, which means no helmets required. Just seatbelts and whatever dignity you arrived with. You sit low, the engine sits in front of you, and when it starts up the Octagon knows about it.
The Guy Behind the Handlebars
Andrew Sim graduated from the University of Otago with a business degree, majored in accounting, and did what any sensible person would do with that qualification: he became a tour guide instead. He spent time running Speight’s Brewery tours – learning the Dunedin patter, getting comfortable with crowds, figuring out which stories people actually wanted to hear versus which ones he was supposed to tell.
The trike idea came from seeing a five-seater on TripAdvisor somewhere overseas and thinking Dunedin had better scenery than wherever that was. He was probably right. The city has the harbour, the peninsula, the beaches, the hills, and enough heritage architecture to keep a commentary going for an hour without repeating himself. He is the kind of guide who adjusts the route based on who is in the back seats – locals get a different tour than cruise ship passengers, and first-timers get a different one again.
How It Feels at the Speed Limit
You would think 50 kilometres an hour would feel ordinary. You do it every day in a car without thinking about it. But 50 in the back of an open trike, sitting about half a metre off the road with nothing between you and the air except sunglasses, feels like something else entirely.
The engine is loud in a way that vibrates through your chest. The wind comes at you from every angle. Corners feel sharper because you can see the road surface passing right beside you. One early passenger described it as a scenic rollercoaster, and that is not far off – except the scenery is real and the rollercoaster only goes the speed limit.
There is a particular moment, pulling away from a stop at full throttle with that V8 opening up, where your brain briefly registers that you are doing something unusual. Then the view takes over and you forget to be impressed by the machine.
Two Ways to See the Place You Already Know
The Peninsula Run
The Peninsula tour is the one most people choose, and for good reason. You leave from outside the Art Gallery, rumble through the city past the railway station and the harbour edge, and then the road starts to climb. Highcliff Road takes you along the spine of the Otago Peninsula with the harbour on one side and the open Pacific on the other, and from the back of an open trike the scale of it hits differently than it does through a car window.
There is a viewpoint stop where you can see the full length of the harbour stretching back toward Port Chalmers, the container ships at anchor, the sandspit at Aramoana, and the beaches below the cliffs. On a clear day the light on the water is the kind of thing you would photograph badly and show people anyway. Andrew fills the gaps between views with local history and the kind of detail that only comes from running this route hundreds of times – which building used to be what, why that particular hill has that particular name.
The Brighton Loop
The Brighton loop is the other option, and it pulls in the opposite direction. Instead of the harbour and the peninsula, you head south – past St Clair, over the headland at Blackhead where the road gets narrow and the coastline gets rough, and down to Brighton beach with its long stretch of sand and its surfers.
Then comes Saddle Hill. The road climbs steadily and when you come over the top the Taieri Plains open up in front of you – flat farmland running toward the Rock and Pillar Range, a completely different landscape from the harbour you left twenty minutes ago. It is a reminder of how much geography Dunedin contains within a short drive, and from the back of the trike with the wind pressing against you and the V8 pulling uphill, the panorama feels earned. The return runs along the motorway back into the city, and the sudden contrast between open plains and urban streets is the kind of gear change Dunedin does well.
Who Actually Books a Trike Tour
The Gift You Did Not Know Existed
Most Dunedinites will never book a trike tour for themselves. It does not occur to you. You already live here – why would you pay someone to drive you around streets you know? But give it as a present and suddenly it makes perfect sense. Your parents are visiting from the North Island and you have already taken them to the Royal Albatross Centre. A friend is turning fifty and does not need another bottle of wine. Your partner has been here three years and still has not been up Highcliff Road.
The trike sits in a category of gift that barely exists in Dunedin: local experiences that feel like events. Not a voucher for a restaurant, not a scenic flight over Milford – something that starts in the Octagon and covers ground you recognise, but from a vantage point you never would have chosen yourself.
Cruise Ship Days and the Octagon Queue
When a cruise liner docks at Port Chalmers and the shuttle buses roll into the city, the Octagon takes on a different energy. Suddenly there are a thousand people with four hours to fill and a strong desire to not spend it in a gift shop. The trike does well on those days – it offers something self-contained, scenic, and genuinely different from the hop-on hop-off bus sitting two hundred metres away.
But the cruise ship crowd is only part of the picture. The trike gets booked for birthdays, weddings, hens’ nights, and the occasional anniversary where someone wants to do something that is not dinner. It works for a sixty-year-old couple wanting the Peninsula views and a twenty-one-year-old wanting the V8 noise equally well. The common thread is not age or occasion – it is wanting an experience that is a bit out of the ordinary without having to leave the city to find it.
The Local Blind Spot
We get it. Trike tours feel like something designed for people who do not live here. The assumption is that you need to be a tourist to enjoy being shown around your own city, and most locals resist that on principle. Fair enough.
But the people who have actually done it – and they are almost always people who were given it as a gift or roped in by a visiting friend – tend to come back with a slightly sheepish enthusiasm. There is something about seeing streets you drive every day from the low, open, wind-in-your-face seat of a V8 trike that resets the familiarity. The Octagon looks different when you are pulling away from it with an engine note that turns heads. Highcliff Road feels different when you can smell the bush and see the harbour without a windscreen framing it.
You do not suddenly become a tourist in your own city. You just notice things you stopped noticing.
Before You Climb On
What It Costs and Where You Start
Both tours run about an hour. Pricing depends on how many seats you fill – roughly eighty dollars per person for two, dropping to about sixty each with a full load of four. You meet outside the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, top end of the Octagon near the Robbie Burns statue, which is easy enough to find and gives you something to look at while you wait.
If you do not have sunglasses, they will lend you a pair. Same with jackets if the weather turns – and this being Dunedin, the weather has been known to turn between the Octagon and the harbour. Booking is straightforward through their website. No need to overthink it – just pick a route, pick a day, and show up.
Pick Your Weather (Or Do Not)
Dunedin and open-air vehicles have an obvious tension, and there is no point pretending otherwise. A southerly in July will cut through you regardless of heated seats. But the flip side is that winter bookings are easier to get, the Peninsula has a moodiness in cold weather that the summer version does not, and there is a particular bragging right that comes with doing a trike tour in a Dunedin winter and surviving.
Summer is warmer but busier, especially on cruise ship days when slots fill fast. If we were picking the ideal conditions – and we are – a still autumn afternoon on the Peninsula route is hard to argue with. The harbour goes glassy, the light drops low and golden, the air is cool enough to feel alive but not cold enough to regret your choices.
But honestly, part of the appeal is that you are exposed to whatever Dunedin decides to throw at you. Getting rained on halfway up Highcliff Road is not a disaster. It is a story.
There are not many ways to see Dunedin that make you feel like you are seeing it for the first time. Driving the streets you already know, sitting low and open to the air with a Chevy V8 rumbling underneath you, turns out to be one of them. It is the kind of thing you book for someone else and end up wanting to do again yourself.