Truth in advertising has always been a rare commodity, but this 1962 ad for the very first Willys Jeep Wagoneer was positively prophetic. As the first really civilized sport utility vehicle, the Wagoneer really did make history — and today, its children and grandchildren have practically taken over the world.
The ad copy reads:
Different? Definitely!
The new ‘Jeep’ Wagoneer is the first station wagon ever built to offer the comfort, silence, speed and passenger car—plus the safety and traction of 4-wheel drive.The Wagoneer is the one family wagon you can drive almost anywhere, in almost any kind of weather.
It’s the first and only 4-wheel drive wagon with optional automatic transmission and independent front suspension.
The Jeep’ Wagoneer features the power and economy of smoothness of a America’s first and only automotive overhead camshaft engine, the Tornado-OHC.
It has the most usable cargo space…both high and wide. It’s also available in 2-wheel drive models. Step in. Size it up. Try it out at your ‘Jeep’ Dealer’s today!
Willys Motors, world’s largest manufacturer of 4-wheel drive vehicles, one of the growing Kaiser Industries.
(In early 1963, a few months after this ad appeared, Willys Motors would be renamed Kaiser Jeep. The word “Jeep” is in single quotes throughout because Willys was still trying to remind everyone that Jeep was a registered trademark, not a generic term.)
Before the Jeep Wagoneer, 4WD vehicles — including Jeeps — were really too rough-and-ready for normal station wagon duty. The Wagoneer changed all that. Willys boasted that the Wagoneer was “the first completely engineered and contemporary styled passenger, utility, and sportsman vehicle,” offering comfort and versatility as well as go-anywhere capability.
Some of the Wagoneer’s early innovations were a little too far ahead of their time: The independent front suspension (IFS), a $160 option, didn’t catch on and was dropped after about five years. Also short-lived, at least in the U.S. market, was the Tornado OHC engine, which was A.C. Sampietro’s clever modernization of the prewar Continental L-head six that had previously gone into Kaiser and Frazer cars and some bigger Jeep vehicles. The OHC engine’s 140 net horsepower was decent for a 4WD vehicle of this time (AMC and Buick V-8s would be available later), but it was prone to early failure. The Tornado OHC engine would go on to better things in Argentina, and IFS would reappear on later generations of SUVs.
An early Wagoneer is spartan by today’s standards, but compared to contemporary trucks, it was practically a rolling pleasure palace. Available luxury features included:
- Power steering
- Automatic transmission
- Overdrive
- Low pedal power brake
- Transfer case indicator lights
- 100% fresh air heater
- Air conditioning
- Deluxe soft trim with decorator color styling
- Limited slip differential
- Cigar lighter
- Transistor radio
- Electric tail gate window
- Electric clock
It took quite a while for the luxury SUV formula to really catch on, and the even fancier Jeep Super Wagoneer and Custom Special were commercial duds, but the Wagoneer eventually went on to a long and profitable career, and its many successors are everywhere.
As a preview of our modern automotive landscape, I’d be hard-pressed to think of another contemporary vehicle that was more influential or more prophetic than this first Wagoneer.
Related CC Reading
Vintage Review: 1963 Jeep Wagoneer – Jeep’s I.F.S. Road To Nowhere (by Jon Stephenson)
1959 Willys Malibu and 1961 J-100: How The Jeep Wagoneer’s Styling Evolved From Modern To Retro (by Paul N)
You couldn’t be more correct about this groundbreaking vehicle ! Apparently Willy/Kaiser wasn’t well acquainted with Duesenberg ; they where using overhead camshafts decades before Jeep claimed theirs was the first. Jeeps where popular in my Home town of Duxbury, Massachusetts where the Wagoneer was known as the Duxbury Cadillac. A High school friend that lived out on the beach had a 1965 with the OHC 6 , it had an unusual whine type noise on acceleration but seemed to have more zip than most inline six’s.
Collected my mother’s S&H Green Stamps and redeemed them for a Tonka Wagoneer around 1965. I thought they were special vehicles then and still do, especially with the classic grille of the original version. There are not that many vehicles you could buy back then and keep for life but this is one of them.
Interesting story ! I got my Tonka at an antique store for cheap money. Below the model is a Dec 1962 advertisement for the new design in the local weekly.
It’s tough for someone my age not to have a soft spot for the Wagoneer. Trail blazers aren’t always met with immediate success or success at all, but at least the Wagoneer found its niche.
Oddly I’m fixated on the exhaust manifold of the OHC 6–it looks like they tried to eke performance from it. I’m impressed.
I’m surprised the IFS didn’t catch on, but I guess $160 wasn’t chump change.
Good stuff. Thanks, Aaron.
Ok, I get why some people find these features to be useful Cargo space. Height. Four-wheel drive. Why then were so few interested in them for thirty years? What flipped the switch the switch to where now everyone wants an SUV? I believe it was the Ford Explorer in 1991, but what was so different? I don’t remember the marketing being extraordinary. Was it the helicopter parent and the obsession with safety? Because really, these things were like unpiloted cargo ships in regards to road safety or at least a decade. Whatever caused the change, please nuke it from space.
An important driving force for family users was not “helicopter parenting,” but child seat laws, which expanded greatly in the ’90s. If you legally MUST put younger children in child seats (sometimes regardless of actual height/weight, which I think is ridiculous), a tall, boxy, upright vehicle makes that a whole lot easier. Traditional station wagons had no advantage there, but minivans and five-door SUVs did. While minivans were also very popular, they began to suffer (and still suffer) a fairly significant image problem, whereas an SUV was easier to justify as a yuppie lifestyle accessory.
This ended up having very little to do with actual off-roading (which most Explorer or Yukon Denali owners would never seriously contemplate), and while 4WD had obvious appeal in snowier climates, I think child seats ended up being a major driving factor.
And of course it became a very profitable approach for automakers, since a lot of the mechanical bits were already produced in large numbers for their truck lines, and SUVs were able to take advantage of colossal safety and fuel economy loopholes for “trucks” even when they were being sold as essentially POMO family wagons.
Aaron’s response covers part of it. But there’s an even larger factor, the profound fragmentation of the car market starting in the post war years. In the ’50s it was imported and station wagons. In the ’60s it was compacts, pony cars, muscle cars, and 4x4s, with the Scout, Bronco and Blazer all jumping into a rapidly growing segment of the market that Jeep had to itself.
This fragmentation, like so many changes in the cars market, was typically pioneered on the West Coast. The vast open public lands in the West were becoming increasingly popular destinations. Dune buggies, off-road motorcycles and such also fed the trend to outdoor motorsports, camping and exploring.
All of this was deemed to be…cool, from an image point of view. Among the young boomers, Jeeps and all manner of 4x4s and Baja Bugs and VW camper vans and anything that reflected the image of not being tied down to a boring suburban lifestyle was attractive and cool.
I was aware of this from reading magazines and such but it was driven home when I arrived in Southern California in 1976. It was simply fun (and cool) to head to the deserts and mountains on weekends in something suitable.
This cool aspect of the outdorsy lifestyle grew rapidly and exploded in the early-mid ’80s as the boomers came into prime car buying age. Already before the madly popular Jeep Cherokee arrived in 1984, cars like the Toyota LC and Scouts and Wagoneers and all were increasingly being driven by city dwellers in LA and such. The Cherokee blew that wide open.
We were in the middle of it, Yuppies with two kids and I had a good job. Our first new car we bought was a 1985 Cherokee. It was Stephanie’s car to haul the kids to a yuppie preschool where there were scads of other Cherokees. It was simply the hot new mommie-mobile to have. And yes, in our case, we took it to the mountains and deserts on the weekends, but we were the exception.
That’s the start of the SUV craze; the Cherokee blew it open and then the Explorer made it mainstream, as in all over the country. It suddenly became what a Ford station wagon had been in the ’60s.
And it just never slowed down, because the reality is that taller cars like CUVs are simply more appealing in terms of their seating architecture, sitting taller and more upright. And as Aaron said, easier for car seats.
The simple reality is that making cars ever lower and longer and wider was a dead-end mistake. Now CUVs are back to the format cars were back in the ’30s and ’40s.
The one point I would add to this is that I think child seat laws also contributed materially to the demise of the inexpensive coupe as a lifestyle vehicle alternative. During the period when off-roaders were taking off, sporty coupes were still extremely popular — sales of the Camaro and Celica both peaked in the late ’70s — and they remained so into the ’80s, for what I think were a lot of similar reasons: Driving a sporty coupe was a way to demonstrate that one was still young, free, and hip, at heart if not in fact.
However, part of the commercial viability of the 2+2 coupe was that little kids could sit in the back, so 20somethings or 30somethings with young children didn’t have to immediately trade the sporty car for a station wagon. Once child seats were required, coupes abruptly became really impractical for anyone with preteen children, even as a second car, and coupe sales started falling off because they were only feasible for singletons and empty-nesters. The SUV didn’t suffer that problem: One could put kids in an XJ Cherokee five-door pretty easily, and it still felt like it could head out to the desert or up to the mountains even if if what it mostly did was grocery shopping and school runs.
I would add CAFE to this list. Station wagons were “cars”, but SUV were “light trucks”, which were subject to less stringent regulations. The big-block Impala wagon you got to tow the camper was no longer available after the mid-1970s, so if you needed big-block power, you traded in the Impala for a Suburban.
YES this. As I like to put it, the CAFE standards had a loophole big enough to drive a truck through – literally. When they were enacted in the mid-’70s it was difficult imagining most Americans trading their cars for the light trucks then available – full-size vans, militaresque SUVs, and pickup trucks. But then came minivans, crossovers, and ever more luxurious pickup trucks with rear doors and two rows of seats, all pitched at former passenger-car drivers. With fewer pollution, fuel economy, or safety standards to meet, that’s where Detroit concentrated their efforts, and it’s practically all they sell now. It’s true that crossovers are huge all over the world now in countries whose laws don’t favor them, but American fashions have long been widely copied.
I’m amazed CAFE is still in effect, despite several supposedly anti-regulatory administrations in power since then.
Interesting and likely wise comments from Aaron about carseats. I’d never considered the factor of carseats in my many rants about all the oversize, overweight, over consumptive passenger trucks on the road. Any analysis would have to be extrapolated of course, but I wonder if there is a net savings of lives in the mix? I mean add 1500 or 2000 pounds to a vehicle, raise it a foot or a foot in a half in the air, burn more fuel with less emissions controls, much higher bumpers meaning much harder on pedestrians or even other drivers in smaller vehicles, and I wonder if there is actually a new savings of lives. A very complicated equation I don’t know how to calculate.
Back on the original subject, having had a ’66 Jeep Gladiator, the near twin from the front doors forward, I’m eternally baffled by the love for these things. Mine was a stripper, 3 on the tree and a radio. Oh yeah, the old Rambler 327 V8, which on it’s best day probably never put out 150HP, not even the power of a good 6 cylinder. While I liked the looks of it, it was so profoundly limited in so many ways it was dumbfounding.
I’ve got to wonder if all the love for these things comes from people who never drove them or lived with them for more than a couple of weeks? And no, I don’t have unrealistic expectations for the era, mine was only 10 years old when I had it. And I was coming from a VW Bus.
Yep ;
One of my teachers in 1963, Mr. Gifford was a WWII Veteran who one or twice took the class somewhere when it was snowing, I remember his brandy new Jeep Wagoneer well .
It was quiet and smooth and had a great heater that came up quickly, a rare thing back then in New England .
-Nate