![]() ![]() In 1964, the company introduced a new version, this one built on the brawnier Chevelle platform. Though the Ranchero was a steady seller, the first incarnation of the El Camino was not and Chevy discontinued it after just two years. In the United States, however, ute-type vehicles were slower to catch on. The ute was a huge hit eventually, virtually every company that sold cars Down Under made its own version. In response, Ford engineer Lewis Brandt designed a low-slung sedan-based vehicle that was a ritzy passenger car in the front, with wind-up windows and comfortable seats and a rough-and-tumble pickup in back. Legend has it that a farmer’s wife from rural Victoria had written a letter to Ford Australia, asking the company to build a car that could carry her to church on Sundays and her husband’s pigs to market on Mondays. Since the 1930s, Australian farmers had been driving what they called “utes”-short for “coupé utility”-all around the outback. It was, ads trilled, “the most beautiful thing that ever shouldered a load!” “It rides and handles like a convertible,” Chevy said, “yet hauls and hustles like the workingest thing on wheels.”įord’s Ranchero was the first “car-truck” sold in the United States, but it was not a new idea. Inspired by the Ford Ranchero, which had already been on the market for two years, the El Camino was a combination sedan-pickup truck built on the Impala body, with the same “cat’s eye” taillights and dramatic rear fins. On October 16, 1958, Chevrolet begins to sell a car-truck hybrid that it calls the El Camino. ![]()
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