On a frigid February morning in 1941, Red Hausmann threw his bag into the back of his topless vehicle and started the engine. From Toledo, Ohio, where he worked for Willys-Overland Motors, he made the journey to the seat of American power in just under 13 hours, apparently unbothered by the icy wind that whipped his hair the entire way.
Arriving in DC, Hausmann headed to the Capitol building, pausing long enough to allow three uniformed soldiers and two elected men from New York State to board, and watched with satisfaction as the five proceeded to free the steps of the Capitol. pearl white color. of the United States Congress. After the publicity stunt, a newspaper columnist asked Hausmann what the machine was called. He replied: “It’s a jeep!”
It was also the basis for one of the two most iconic automobile designs of all time, Adam to Porsche’s Eve car, the 911. In 2002, MoMA added a 1953 Willys-Overland Jeep to its then-small group of automobiles, noting that it was “among the most significant inventions of industrial civilization.”
The new jeep was a stuck-up little thing. Stocky and snub-nosed, with a vertical front window, it had a four-cylinder, 61-horsepower engine and four-wheel drive, allowing it to climb steep terrain. It could be packaged flat, to be conveniently airdropped around the world, and then assembled by an eight-man team in less than four minutes. Plus, it was really cute, a toy-like pickup truck commissioned by the US military to kill Nazis.
After the war, the U.S. military left many of its 637,000 Jeeps behind when it departed. This latest free sample leads to numerous local varieties. The British tested the concept with Land Rover. The Japanese improved it considerably with the Toyota Land Cruiser. There were also countless imitations: the poorly proportioned Soviet Xerox, the UAZ-469, is the definition of mignon-moche – and wild remixes, like the Jeepney in the Philippines, which combined the jeep with a Rolls and a school bus to become the preferred public transportation there.
American automakers began producing a variety of “CJs,” or civilian jeeps. But by the 1980s, the future of what had become the J-capital Jeep brand was up in the air after a series of lackluster corporate owners. Then came Lee Iacocca, the brash automaker and chairman of Chrysler, who acquired Jeep in 1987 and championed new models at the dawn of the SUV era. Among them was a clear heir to the Willys legacy, the Jeep Wrangler.
Although modernized and expanded, the Wrangler maintained the essential elements of the original military commission design. The roof fell in; also the doors; and both were obviously DIY operations, with the hardware to make it visible. It had four-wheel drive. It was perfectly designed to stimulate the two main pleasure zones of the American id (the top-down one at the mall and the weekend survival one) and achieved a new kind of cultural hegemony. There was Alicia Silverstone, driving a pearl white Wrangler in Cluelessand Laura Dern, dragging her ass in one of hungry dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
“The key element of the jeep is that it is ‘the liberator,’” said Clotaire Rapaille, an anthropologist and marketing consultant who conducted research on consumer psychology for Chrysler in the late 1990s. Rapaille, who was helping the company decide how to market the Jeep brand globally in an era defined by critical views of American interventionism, told me they found the idea to be surprisingly durable. Even in Germany, he said, consumers associate the Jeep with liberation. “We said, ‘But you’re German.’ And they said, ‘Yes, but they freed us… from us.'”
In practice, this has meant that the Wrangler’s design has resisted radical changes, including the large size that most other SUVs underwent. Shibboleths include the rounded headlights, which are increasingly rare in the industry, and the seven-slot vertical grille that is directly reminiscent of the Willys. Another is the body shape, the classic two-box silhouette recognizable from 200 feet away. “A three-year-old should be able to identify that it’s a Jeep,” Vince Galante, Jeep’s vice president of exterior design, told me.
Galante, a 19-year company veteran, recalled conducting a design study several years ago to determine how far they could widen the angle of the windshield. The original was upright, at almost 90 degrees, so it could be easily folded. But over the years, windshields have generally become steeper to improve aerodynamics and fuel economy.
Jeep designers studied a network of windshields of different angles, some of which would have provided greater efficiency. “We were very careful about how far we went with that,” Galante said, because “at a certain point it stops being a Wrangler.” In the end, the newly designed windshield only changed a few degrees.
So what makes a jeep a jeep, even when it’s not a jeep? War correspondent Ernie Pyle defined it as a vehicle “as faithful as a dog, as strong as a mule and as agile as a goat.” But size also matters. And as large, inefficient SUVs began to lose popularity, compact SUVs emerged. The global small SUV market is expected to grow to $590 billion by 2034, up from $550 billion last year, becoming the dominant form factor in many regions.
“Customers are starting to prefer cars that are more compact and have the same level of adaptability as SUVs,” said a Precedence Research analyst, citing “growing demand for cars that strike a compromise between practicality and small size.” Which is the way automotive analysts say dog-mule-goat.
But it’s true that every major brand suddenly seems to need its own small SUV, preferably electric, given the taste of global calamity of our era. This year we have new jeeplets such as the Volvo EX30, Polestar 3, Porsche Macan and Jeep’s own version, the Avenger, a small all-electric vehicle. Some of these heirs are more linear-like than others, and many electric vehicles are available with all-wheel drive, even if driving your Kia Niro over icy ditches is less than advisable. Which ultimately means tiny and capable may prove to be the little Jeep’s most lasting design legacy.