Ford Ranchero and Chevrolet El Camino live on

Did you ever wonder what happened to the Ford Ranchero and Chevrolet El Camino?

(Unless you're of a 'certain age' you might have no idea what I'm talking about...)

With the car-i-fication of trucks and the truck-i-fication of cars over the past 30 years or so, you might have thought that a passenger car-based pick-up truck might be just the ticket.

Not so's you'd notice.

Volkswagen gave it a shot with their Rabbit pick-up, as did Dodge with the Omni-based Rampage.

I guess the Subaru Baja sort-of qualifies too. Chevy Avalanche and Honda Ridgeline aren't far off, but those are really SUV-based, rather than car-based.

But with very few exceptions, these all shared one attribute - nobody cared.

Here in Australia, however, the concept carries on in the form of the 'ute', short for 'utility'. They aren't as prevalent as they once were, but you still see a lot of them.

Actually it doesn't just 'carry on', it seems to have been invented here.

It may be an urban legend, but Ford's story and they're sticking to it is that back in 1932, a farmer's wife wrote to Ford complaining about riding to church in her husband's farm truck, which, needless to say, was a bit, er, ripe.

Apparently, banks would finance farm trucks but not cars. People could typically only afford one vehicle, so a truck it was.

"Why can't you make a vehicle which can take the pigs to market on Saturday, and us to church on Sunday?" she wrote.

Maybe there were no PR people to shuffle this letter onto in those days; in any event it led Ford to graft a pick-up box onto a passenger-car chassis, reinforce it appropriately, and thus was born, officially, the 'coupe-utility'.

My local sources say the true nick-name for these things - what the people who buy them (largely in the rural north) call them - is 'tilly', suggesting a marketing tie-in with a certain Canadian hat-maker is but one letter and some dangling corks attached to the brim away...

Only southerners and marketing types call them 'utes'.

The concept became wildly popular, and major competitors soon followed suit. The one shown here is a fairly new General Motors Holden, gussied up well beyond any pretense of being a farm truck.

Today, a big chunk of the 'ute-tilly' business is being taken away by SUV-like pick-ups, akin to our Ford Explorer Sport pick-up thing.

But they do live on.

I have yet to find out if the Aussie utes spawned their mid-'50s North American cousins or if, like much of Australia's flora and fauna, the North American models evolved separately.

Guess I'm gonna have to Google that...

Comments

[nissan Philadelphia]

Right now passenger car based pickups are little bit big in size,Though I dont have a any idea about Ford Ranchero and Chevrolet El Camino but as I am driving a 1997 GM SUV, I will definitely go for a passenger car with heavy load taking ability, As i have habit of camping,hunting,fishing. So I need to carry utilities.

[Brian]

If you believe Top Gear, they were invented so you could "take the sheep to market on Saturday and your wife to church on Sunday."

You can also buy them in the UK branded as Vauxhalls.

[Larry]

I think it's fair to say the Australians invented the ute by taking a car and giving it a bed (with some reinforcement) for pickup-like capacity, whereas the Ranchero and El Camino took existing sedan/wagon platforms and put new bodies on them. The Australians also seem to have been able to create their own exclusive ute versions of vehicles that didn't exist in their home countries, such as the Standard Vanguard and Chrysler Valiant.

[Mac churchill]

If I own a Chev SSR in the province of Quebec and I need winter tires to drive and there are none. What can I do? Do I have an attractive but useless toy for the summer only? How can a major manufacturer sell but not support a product? When I asked the local GM people to ask they just said that THERE ARE NONE, too bad. Toyota at least tries to find answers .MAC

[Jim Kenzie]

Top Gear can't take credit for that comment, because that's what the Aussie farmer's wife said way back in 1932, and Jeremy Clarkson isn't THAT old! Unless you give them credit for 'sheep' instead of 'pigs'...

Interesting too; I read somewhere that this was more-or-less the same product mandate for the Citroen Deux Chevaux, whose design started in the late 1030s, but was only produced after the war.

Great minds...

Jim Kenzie

[Jim Kenzie]

Hi Mac:

Not sure it's GM's fault as much as the tire companies'. Have you checked with a sampling of independent tire stores which handle a wide range of brands? You'd think SOMEBODY would make tires of that size! You'd want to buy a separate set of r8ims anyway to preserve the alloys, so maybe you can go "one-up" or "one-down" in wheel and tire size.

Again, an independent tire retailer is your best friend.

There are also a couple of huge on-line US-based tire stores (like TireRack) which, I understand service Canada as well - give them a try.

Jim Kenzie

[Larry]

Vauxhall most recently sold a version of the Holden Monaro and VXR8, and presented a version of the Maloo ute. Other than some models shared across the GM range, such as the Astra and Vectra, Holdens and Vauxhalls aren't the same.

[Jim Kenzie]

Hi Larry:

But historically, most Holdens have been based on older Opel/Vauxhall platforms.

Jim Kenzie

[Larry]

Hi Jim,

It depends on the era you're looking at. Holden built the Vauxhall Viva for a while (the one that was known as the Envoy Epic here), then switched to their own designs and platforms.

It was in the mid-1970s that the real platform-sharing/badge engineering with other GM products began: the Gemini (GM T-car, a/k/a 'Buick Opel by Isuzu'), then the Commodore (two different Opel sedans stuck together!) and GM's J-bodies, followed by all sorts of Suzuki/Isuzu rebadges in the '80s and the current similarities to the Vauxhall/Opel lineup.