posted at the Cohort by Owen
Here we go again; another Niedermeyer box. But this is a very special one, and mighty rare. It’s the smallest step van ever made in the US to my knowledge, as is obvious with that towering Sprinter next to it. And since it’s a Grumman, it’s made out of aluminum, so it’ll never rust. Someone’s stripped this one of its paint, like the American Airline planes of yore.
Tiny, FWD, and powered by a VW Rabbit/Golf 54 hp diesel drive train. Why? It was the early eighties, when oil was tight and expected to keep getting tighter. Grumman built this with the hopes of winning a USPS contract, but it was even too small for them, so they went back to the drawing board and came up with the still-used LLV, one or two notches bigger.
The result was that only some 500 of the KubVans were ever built, so this is a rare find. I found one some years back, and if you want all the details I could muster on the Kubvan, head over to my CC on it.
This is made of aluminum? Funny, it doesn’t look like an F-150…
These would be useless for mail delivery in most postal routes in the US now. Back when the KubVan was designed, there were still lots of Jeeps delivering the post. The growth of the internet and e-commerce changed everything; letters and postcards are out, boxes of merch are in and they need lots of space. Where I live, the Grumman LLVs are nearly gone, replaced by Ram Promasters. Wonder how much improvement the new Oshkosh postal vehicles will be, especially if USPS follows through with plans for 90% of them to be ICE-powered.
LLVs are still around a bit, but in my area of Chicago there were a ton of Chevy Uplanders that are now getting replaced by Promasters.
Plenty of LLVs and ProMasters (I call them PostMasters!) in eastern Maine. My mail comes via a Mercedes Metris in USPS livery.
I does make me smile that this was considered as being too small when vans like this Vauxhall Combo are still regularly used by the Royal Mail on the routes around my area.
I do love this Grumman though. Like an LLV with a roof chop.
Hey, not a big deal, but I was the one to post this, not canadiancatgreen.
Not sure if you saw my caption, but there was another kubvan sitting across the street in a similar stripped fashion!
Oops; sorry. Fixed now.
I wonder what these are up to?
What’s interesting is that according to this registry: https://divemaster.ca/kubvans/kubvan%20serial%20number%20database.htm (which I’m sure is far from exhaustive) nearly 10% of the kubvans accounted for are on and around vancouver island! And one of the banner pictures was taken exactly where i took pictures of this one.
Was the frame also aluminum?
Quite a funky little van would make for a fun efficient camper conversion.
I looked into buying a retired UPS truck to convert into a camper back in the 80’s. I was told that their trucks were scrapped and never sold to the public. They did not want their most visible representative of their business being used as a hippie van, camper, rolling whorehouse,etc. it seems wasteful but you can’t blame them.