Hemmings Motor News Blog Blog

Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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The Jeep Wide-Trac

Posted August 30, 2011 8:00 AM by dstrohl

During the Cold War, the U.S. funded the Kaiser International Vehicle Investigation (IVI) program in an attempt to design a low-cost vehicle that could be built in Third World countries. Several body styles were designed, including a pickup, pickup panel and a van-like troop carrier. Based on his redesign of an FC-series Jeep, it's not much of a stretch to say that Brooks Stevens designed the Wide-Trac (above) for Kaiser.

Of course, the FC facelift never happened and the Wide-Trac never went into production. At least, not in such a form. In the 1950s over in Spain (which is hardly a third-world country), the locomotive builder CAF started a subsidiary called VIASA (Vehiculos Industriales y Agricolas, S.A.) to license the design of the Jeep CJ-3B from Kaiser-Willys and build it in VIASA's factory in Zaragoza. A decade later, VIASA introduced a small cab-forward van called the SV, available as a pickup (Cid), crew-cab pickup (Duplex), cargo van (Van, later Furgon) or nine-seat minibus (Caravan, later Toledo).

A very basic design, powered by either a Perkins four-cylinder diesel or a Jeep Hurricane straight-six gasoline engine, it resembled nothing in Kaiser's stateside or South American Jeep lineups.

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#1

Re: The Jeep Wide-Trac

08/30/2011 9:26 AM

This image is off by a day:

Ugly Cars - Engineering Design Disasters

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#2

Re: The Jeep Wide-Trac

08/31/2011 8:55 AM

Ugly or not - I would sure love to have one of these for rattling around the farm. Waaaay superior to a Gator or other side-by-side ATV, and it was probably under $2,500! Looking at the price tags on a s-b-s, that would seal the deal.

Where can I buy one?????

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