129 Although many enthusiasts consider the Willys postwar station wagon to be a truck, the company usually referred to it as a passenger car. It was hard for management not to compete in the traditional car market. After all, the company had once been the number-three automaker in the world. Management wanted to keep a toe in the passenger car business at any cost, realizing it would help them when they were finally able to add passenger cars to the product line.
130 Many enthusiasts and historians believe that Willys came up with the idea of putting four-wheel drive in its station wagon all by itself, but that’s not the case. During 1948, the US Army asked Willys management if they could design, engineer, and build such a vehicle. The military was even then looking for more four-wheel-drive vehicles for various jobs that the MB couldn’t perform. In response, Willys engineers produced a prototype four-wheel-drive wagon for the army.
Although it doesn’t appear that the army thought enough of it to ask for more (in other words, offer a production contract), Willys felt the concept was a good one and rushed it into production for 1949. It gave the company and its dealers another product to sell, something that had no real competition.
As a direct result of building an experimental four-wheel-drive station wagon prototype for the US Army, Willys was able to introduce a new four-wheel-drive wagon for 1949.
131 Regardless of what anyone may say, the first sport utility vehicle (SUV) was the 1949 Willys Jeep 4x4 station wagon. It was built from the ground up as a family station wagon, and it came with factory-installed four-wheel drive. It was engineered for hard off-road driving. In light of the immense size of the worldwide SUV market today, the Willys Jeep four-wheel-drive station wagon is one of the most historic vehicles on the planet.
132 When the Willys Jeep pickup debuted in late 1947, it was offered in five basic versions: bare chassis, cab and chassis, pickup, box truck (with a box bolted on), and platform stake truck. These were available in a two-wheel-drive 1/2-ton version or as a 1-ton version equipped with four-wheel drive.
Do trucks get any prettier than this? The 1956 Willys Jeep 1-ton pickup was a sturdy beast and ruggedly handsome.
133 The next line of senior Jeep vehicles to appear were the Forward Control (FC) models. The first of these, the FC-150, arrived in December 1956 as a 1957 model. The FC-150 pickup was rated at 5,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (GVW) and was based on a beefed-up CJ-5 chassis. It rode an 81-inch wheelbase and had a close-coupled pickup body. Power was supplied by the Willys Hurricane 4-cylinder engine.
Willys Motors went out on a limb, style-wise, when it introduced the Jeep FC-150 (the FC stood for Forward Control). With a short CJ wheelbase and a 4-cylinder F-head mill, it was built for difficult work, mainly off-highway.
134 The next FC model to arrive was the FC-170 pickup truck, which was built on a much longer 103.5-inch wheelbase and powered by the sturdy Kaiser-Willys 226-ci 6-cylinder engine. The FC-170 pickup came with a long cargo bed.
The FC-170 heavy-duty pickup, introduced for 1957, boasted a longer wheelbase and larger engine than the FC-150 series. All FC trucks produced in the United States were four-wheel-drive units.
135 Both FC models were also offered in cab-and-chassis and cowl-and-chassis versions so that buyers could arrange to have any sort of specialty body installed on it. Many went into service as farm trucks and tow trucks.
136 The rarest civilian FC trucks are the FC-170 Dual Rear Wheel versions, which were produced for just three years in the United States. For 1959, the factory produced just 335 of them; for 1960 it built 402 units; then for 1961, another 320 were built.
137 The best year for FC truck production in the United States was 1957, when 6,637 FC-150s and 3,101 FC-170s were produced in the Toledo factory, for a total of 9,738 FC trucks built during the calendar year.
138 Although they were never especially popular in the United States, the Jeep Forward Control truck models ended up being one of the longest-lived Jeep vehicles in production. The reason for that is that after being produced from 1956 to 1965 in the United States, the tooling was sold to Mahindra & Mahindra, a Jeep affiliate and assembler in India. That company produced many FC variants over the ensuing decades, including a very popular bus model that was in production into the late 1990s, for the local market.
139 Mahindra & Mahindra expanded the FC truck model range to include an FC-160, FC-360, and FC-460, along with a passenger bus, cargo van, paddy wagon, ambulance, and army personnel carrier. Production continued in India into the 1990s, and sales brochures often appear for sale on eBay. They are quite an interesting collectible item.
140 Willys was always looking for ways to grow its sales volume without incurring much tooling expense. In that spirit, in 1961 the company began producing the Willys Jeep FJ-3 Step Van for the US Post Office, which used the small trucks for mail delivery. The FJ-3 chassis was essentially a two-wheel-drive DJ-5 modification, and to save the cost of tooling the body was produced by an outside company, Highway Products, in Ohio. A larger-body van was sold through Willys Jeep dealers as the Jeep FJ-3A, and these were popular with package delivery firms and laundry companies.
141 Jeep manufactured the FJ-3 chassis at its plant in Toledo, Ohio, and then shipped them to Highway Products’ small factory. Highway Products then installed the van body on the chassis and arranged for delivery to the US Post Office or, in the case of an FJ-3A, to a dealer.
The FJ line of commercial vans was available in two series. The FJ-3 was a short-body unit built for the US Post Office; the FJ-3A (seen here) had a longer body and was pitched to commercial users such as package delivery, florists, dry cleaners, etc.
142 By 1966, a new version of the FJ series was introduced, dubbed the FJ-6, which was followed by the slightly modified FJ-6A in 1967. These vehicles are much less common today than the FJ-3 models, and they appear to have been sold exclusively to the US Post Office. Nowadays both the FJ-3 and FJ-6 are collected by people who love the unusual. Sadly, many of them have been hot rodded or heavily modified, which is a shame considering their rarity.
143 Most people don’t know it, but the FJ series wasn’t the only Jeep-based van. During the 1960s, Jeep’s Spanish affiliate, a company by the name of Viasa, produced a line of unique Jeep vehicles that included a panel van, passenger van, and van-based pickup. The bodies were tooled and produced locally, and they look like no other Jeep product ever produced. Picture a Ford Econoline, only bigger, squarer, and much-sturdier looking.
This is a nice, circa-1957 Jeep 1-ton pickup in its natural environment: off-road.
Body and Interior
144 As mentioned earlier, the first of the “senior” Jeep vehicles to be produced was the station wagon. Designed by Brooks Stevens, it generated quite a bit of talk within the industry because it was the first all-steel station wagon. Prior to its introduction, station wagons had used expensive, hand-built wooded bodies, and thus the vehicles were priced at where usually only people with high incomes could afford them. The Willys Station Wagon, in comparison, was priced at $1,495, undercutting the Chevrolet’s $1,605 price; a big difference in those days. That price differential continued: In 1947, the Chevy wagon was priced at $1,893 versus $1,616 for the Willys wagon; in 1948, the Chevy wagon was tagged