[Auto] Jeep at 80: we drive the icons

[Agent47]

 

 

Eighty years span several lifetimes in car terms, so it’s little surprise that in mechanical terms there’s really little in common between the Willys MB – the first vehicle we now recognise as a Jeep – and the latest Wrangler. They’re different machines from different eras, built by different companies for very different purposes.

There is, however, an undeniable link between the two. It’s the shared guiding ethos that both are designed to offer: freedom. A very American sort of freedom at that, the sort best served with fireworks, cheerleaders, chants of ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!’ and a side of cheese-smothered freedom fries.

The past 18 months or so have given us all a new appreciation of freedom and the ability to go where we want when we want. I reflect on that from behind the thin steering wheel of the MB. This is the first jeep, from a time when that moniker was a nickname rather than a brand with a capital ‘J’. It’s a vehicle designed to go anywhere, and by modern standards it’s startlingly minimalist: the dashboard is stripped to its essentials, there’s no roof or seatbelts and a haggard fabric strap merely hints at side protection without offering any.
Still, once you’ve mastered the vagaries of starting it (heel on brake, toe pushing accelerator, stretch under the dash for the ignition button) and received a thorough workout wrestling for gears using the long-throw stick, it’s easy to see why the MB was a seminal vehicle for military use – and why it was so quickly embraced by civilians.

This is stripped-back, raw freedom in motoring form. At speed, the MB is disarmingly easy and fun to drive, enjoyably open to the elements and still feeling as rugged and indestructible as it did 80 years ago. You feel it could still tackle the roughest of off-road tracks without breaking a sweat.

It’s that sense of go-anywhere motoring freedom that millions of buyers of this vehicle’s descendants have enjoyed and why the Jeep’s natural home is in the wilds of the American west, traversing the rocky Rubicon Trail or the rubble-strewn, sun-baked tracks around Moab.
Then I turn a corner at speed and, instead of a faceful of desert sand, I’m hit with the full force of a chilly Cambridgeshire wind and a faceful of sodden, decaying leaves. Our freedoms may be returning, but the restrictions and complications of travel mean celebrating Jeep’s 80th birthday in the UK, not Utah.

Still, the Imperial War Museum Duxford is a fitting venue, because the creation of the MB in 1940 was rooted in a very literal fight for freedom. In July of that year, with World War II escalating, officials recognised a need for a new light reconnaissance vehicle to replace its ageing fleet of converted Ford Model Ts. The War Department drew up a list of requirements and invited 135 manufacturers to tender for production. Two responded.
Those bids came from the American Bantam Car Co and Ohiobased Willys-Overland. Bantam was the quickest to respond, with a prototype beginning tests a staggering 49 days after the tender was received. But with doubts over Bantam’s ability to meet the production run, the War Department invited WillysOverland and Ford to bid on the contract and gave them access to the Bantam design to speed up the process. The Army then subjected the three designs to a triple test that probably matched Autocar’s equivalent in its thoroughness.
The Willys-Overland Quad was the most powerful, thanks to its 60hp Go Devil four-cylinder engine, the Bantam was the most fuel efficient and the Ford Pygmy was better constructed and had superior design details. The Army continued to revise the specifications – the original maximum vehicle weight of 1300lb was deemed too low, for example – and eventually awarded the first build contract to Willys-Overland. Ford later gained a contract to help meet production demand. For its efforts, Bantam was granted a contract to build trailers.

 

Link : https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/features/jeep-80-we-drive-icons