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The History of the American Minivan

Today, the minivan is a familiar site on any road and family –oriented neighborhood, but, that was not the case 18 years ago when the first one rolled off the Chrysler assembly line. Then, it was a revelation that likely kept that car-maker off the dust-heap of history and shaped 30 years of auto design.

At Classic Chevrolet, we have worked on our share on minivans in Beaumont  TX, so that's why we're delighted to be sharing this blog with you.

Designed mainly for passengers, a minivan is a vehicle with two or three rows of seating accessed via large doors, often of the sliding variety. It typically offers car-like handling and fuel economy, with front or all-wheel drive; taller than a station wagon or sedan, and with re-configurable interiors, to accommodate passengers or cargo. It sat lower than a full-size van, and the front-wheel-drive provided a flat floor for cargo and passengers. It could fit in the same parking spaces as a car, but had ample room to carry whatever a suburban family might want to take along. And with removable seats, it could even haul sheets of 4’ x 8’ plywood laying flat, something no station wagon or sedan something no sedan could do.

Former Ford officials Lee Iacocca and Hal Sperlich, now with Chrysler, convinced the struggling automaker to invest in its development and wound up with a game-changer.

After two oil crises, sedans and station wagons were shrinking  to save fuel and, with their pickup underpinnings,  and truck-like poor fuel economy, full-size vans were falling out of favor while the first unrefined, four-wheel-drive off-roaders that eventually became “sports utility vehicles,” were best suited for driving in rural or snowy conditions. In North America, the term alludes to its size compared to full-size vans, which are more like traditional full-size pickup trucks.  

Predecessors include the 1936 Stout Scarab, with a removable table and 180-degree-turning second-row seats. Among the first vehicles to feature modern minivan characteristics, the DKW Schnellaster, was produced from 1949 to 1962, and in 1950, the Volkswagen Type 2 configured the Beetle with a bus-shaped body and introduced a sliding side door in 1968, giving it all the features that eventually defined a minivan. The 1956 Fiat Multipla was also similar.

In 1972, Ford Motor Company designers developed the family-friendly Carousel prototype  to better fit a van into a typical 7-foot  American garage door, but money problems and the fuel crises of the mid-1970s prevented the vehicle from ever being produced. About a decade later, designers revisited the concept  in the Ford Aerostar.

Market research had determined that if a vehicle could be designed with a floor low enough for a woman to comfortably drive it, with enough “crush space” between the engine and the driver in case of an accident and small enough to fit in a residential garage, it could succeed.

After a six-year development program to design “a small, affordable van that looked and handled more like a car,” that began in the late 1970s, Chrysler, in 1983, nearly bankrupt at the time and surviving on a $1.5 billion federal loan, introduced the first modern minivans -- the front-wheel-drive Plymouth Voyager and  Dodge Caravan.

In the 1990s, in an unusual twist in automotive evolution, SUVs started getting less truck-like, lower to the ground, and more comfortable for running errands; in other words, they were morphing into minivans.

In 2000, the minivan's U.S. market share peaked, with sales of 1.4 million units, which fell, in 2013, to about half a million.

Today, whatever you call it -- a sport utility vehicle, a crossover, a wagon, or a people hauler – it has its origins in Chrysler's minivan.

Sources: Road & Track, Hemmings Motor News and Autoweek

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