Or are they all left-side drive?
Slapshot III - The Robo Zamboni Awakens
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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Zamboni himself would have wanted it that way.
I live in a right-side drive country.
The first time I ever heard of a Zamboni was when Ryan Renolds drove one over a guy in the first Deadpool movie.
I thought I remembered him also driving one in Van Wilder, but I guess I was just remembering that an ice rink was featured at one point.
Coo, loo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coo! Take off to the Great White North Take off, it's a beauty way to go
I don't know the answer to your question specifically but I will say that many specialty vehicles have the seats in all sorts of unusual locations because of the task they perform and it is irrelevant where in the world they are as far as I know.
Rubbish trucks are a good example of this, often being drivable from either side (at least where I am). That allows the driver to better see their colleagues and bins on the roadside while driving in the suburbs, but switch to the regular position for driving to and from a landfill site.
Also USPS (mail trucks in US) have steering wheel on the opposite side as they frequently stop and leave the vehicle to deliver the mail.
Hi, I drove a LLV for a couple years! It’s actually so, when they stop at a mailbox, they don’t have to leave or lean across the vehicle to reach out to a mailbox on the right side of the road. It is also easier to hop out for packages, as you said, but if I recall the volume of packages was much lower when the vehicles were designed, so they were more focused on delivering letters from one mailbox to the left.
Another fun fact, LLVs are one of the only street legal vehicles in the US with a shorter front wheel axle than the back! This makes turning much tighter so the driver can pull a full U-turn on any standard road without needing a Y-turn, since visibility is pretty awful behind the vehicle when backing up. This also makes them pretty fun to drive.
And in rural areas they will convert regular vehicles like jeeps to RHD
If they did so, they’d also require Zamboni drivers to do their circuits in the opposite direction, counterclockwise instead of clockwise. They like to drive along the boards on the driver’s side so they can tuck up against the wall gently & see just how close they’re getting.
I drove Zambonis at work and of course, I always sat on the left.
Sitting there makes you able to control the left side when you operate and drive close to the walls.
It would work the opposite way but it make no sense to do it. There's a few ice machines producers in the world and I guess it would make the machinery price to raise in order to gain nothing.
Just gonna say I never hear about hockey players from UK or India.
But I have heard of international figure skaters
The UK has an ice hockey league - not sure how many natives are in the teams though. Hockey is massive in (parts of) India - but they tend to play the version without ice…
Scotland has a fair few curling clubs, which I guess would be as likely to use them?
Not at all. Zambonis make ice perfectly flat which isn't what curlers want at all. Curling clubs have ice guys who's job it is to 'pebble' the ice by spritzing it with water. The little bumps are essential for making the rock curl.
Ahh, fair enough. I knew about the pebbling from that one time I went curling while I was in school, but I had assumed that they used something at least zamboni-adjacent to level the ice before doing that. Turns out the method is to just flood it
I'm guessing that they'll be on whatever side Frank Zamboni decided it should be on.
I've only ever heard an Ice Resurfacer being referred to as a Zamboni in the USA. There's not a lot of ice to resurface in Australia and in the Netherlands we used to skate on the river or canal when conditions permitted, no machines there either.
The "drive under the influence" section LOL!!!
huh. i live in a drivers seat on the left country and have only seen zambonis up close with the seat either on the right or in the center