In a world of SUVs, the compact jeep is king

On a freezing February morning in 1941, Red Hausmann tossed his bag into the back of his topless ride and fired up the engine. From Toledo, Ohio, where he worked for Willys-Overland Motors, he made the jaunt to the seat of American power in just under 13 hours, seemingly unbothered by the freezing wind whipping through his hair all the way. 

When he got to DC, Hausmann headed over to the Capitol building, stopped long enough to let three uniformed GIs and two elected men from the state of New York climb aboard, and watched in satisfaction as the fivesome proceeded to “liberate” the pearly-white steps of the United States Congress. After the publicity stunt, a newspaper columnist asked Hausmann what the machine was called. He replied: “It’s a jeep!”

It was also the basis for one of the two most iconic car designs ever, the automotive Adam to Porsche’s Eve, the 911. In 2002, MoMA added a 1953 Willys-Overland Jeep to its then-small stable of cars, noting it was “among the most significant inventions of industrial civilisation”.

The new jeep was a cocky little thing. Squat and snub-nosed, with a vertical front window, it had a four-cylinder, 61-horsepower engine and four-wheel drive, enabling the scaling of steep terrain. It could be flat-packed, for convenient air-dropping around the globe, and then assembled by an eight-man team in under four minutes. Plus it was cute as hell, a toy-like trucklet commissioned by the American armed forces for killin’ Nazis.

A three-year-old should be able to identify a Jeep

After the war, the US military left many of its 637,000 jeeps behind when it shipped out. This ultimate free sample lead to numerous homegrown varieties. Brits took a stab at the concept with Land Rover. The Japanese improved upon it considerably in the Toyota Land Cruiser. There were also countless knock-offs — the poorly proportioned Soviet Xerox, the UAZ-469, is the definition of mignon-moche — and wild remixes, such as the Jeepney in the Philippines, which combined the jeep with a Rolls and a school bus to become the go-to public transportation there.

American automakers started pumping out a variety of “CJs”, or civilian jeeps. But by the 1980s, the future of what had become the capital-J Jeep brand was up in the air after a string of lacklustre corporate owners. Then along came that automotive minx and Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, who acquired Jeep in 1987 and threw his weight behind new models at the dawn of the SUV era. Among them was a clear heir to the Willys legacy, the Jeep Wrangler. 

Although it was modernised and bulked up, the Wrangler kept the design essentials of the original military commission. The roof came off; so did the doors; and both were obviously DIY operations, with the hardware to do so unhidden. It had four-wheel-drive. It was perfectly pitched to stimulate the two main pleasure zones of the American id — top-down-at‑the-mall and weekend-survivalist — and achieved a new kind of cultural hegemony. There was Alicia Silverstone, behind the wheel of a pearly-white Wrangler in Clueless, and Laura Dern, hauling ass in one from hungry dinos in Jurassic Park.

“The key element of the jeep is that it is ‘the liberator’,” said Clotaire Rapaille, an anthropologist and marketing consultant who conducted consumer psychology research for Chrysler in the late 1990s. Rapaille, who was helping the company decide how to market the Jeep brand globally in an era defined by critical views of American interventionism, told me they found the notion was surprisingly durable. Even in Germany, he said, consumers associated the Jeep with liberation. “We said, ‘But you are Germans.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, but they liberated us … from us.’”

Jeeplets: new compact SUVs

Polestar 3, £69,900

Porsche Macan, from £54,900

Volvo EX30, £32,850

In practice, this has meant the design of the Wrangler has resisted radical change, including the supersizing most other SUVs underwent. Shibboleths include the rounded headlamps, which are increasingly rare in the industry, and the seven-slot vertical grill that harkens directly back to the Willys. Another is the body shape, the classic two-box silhouette that’s recognisable from 200 feet away. “A three-year-old should be able to identify, that’s a jeep,” Vince Galante, vice president of Jeep exterior design, told me. 

Galante, a 19-year veteran of the company, recalled conducting a design study several years ago to determine how far they could push the angle of the windscreen. The original had been upright, at nearly 90 degrees, so it could easily be folded down. But over the years, windscreens in general have become more tilted, to improve aerodynamics and fuel economy. 

Jeep designers studied a grid of windscreens of varying angles, some of which would have provided greater efficiency. “We were really careful about how far we went with that,” Galante said, because “at a certain point it stops being a Wrangler”. In the end, the windscreen of the new design only changed a few degrees.

So what makes a jeep a jeep, even when it’s not a Jeep? War correspondent Ernie Pyle defined it as a vehicle that was “as faithful as a dog, as strong as a mule, and as agile as a goat”. But the size also has something to do with it. And as large, inefficient SUVs have started to fall out of favour, compact SUVs have surged. The global market for small SUVs is expected to grow to $590bn by 2034, up from $550bn last year, becoming the dominant form factor in many regions.

“Customers are beginning to favour cars that are more compact and have the same level of adaptability as SUVs,” a Precedence Research analyst noted, citing “rising demand for cars that strike a compromise between practicality and small size”. Which is the automotive analyst way of saying the dog-mule-goat thing.

But it’s true that every major marque suddenly seems to need its own small SUV, preferably electrically powered given our era’s flavour of global calamity. This year we got new jeeplets like the Volvo EX30, Polestar 3, Porsche Macan and Jeep’s own take, the Avenger, a small all-electric. Some of these heirs have more lineal resemblance than others, and many EVs are available with all-wheel drive, even if driving your Kia Niro over frozen trenches is less than advisable. Which ultimately means diminutive and capable may prove the little jeep’s longest-lasting design legacy.