Jeep CJ-5

The round fender starts here. The CJ-5 took its body from the military M38A1 of 1952, the first Willys jeep to abandon the flat wartime wings for a rounded fender and bonnet, and that shape has now outlived every other idea in the company. The proportions changed twice in a way that is easy to spot. Cars up to 1971 sit on an 81 inch wheelbase and look compact and slightly stubby. From 1972 AMC stretched the wheelbase by two and a half inches and the bonnet and fenders by five, widening the track at the same time, which gave the later cars their planted stance and room for the bigger engines. The seven-slot grille carries through unchanged, along with the folding windscreen, exposed hinges and bolt-on body panels. What arrives during the run is decoration rather than design: Tuxedo Park chrome in the early 1960s, then the Golden Eagle bonnet decal, tape stripes and painted steel wheels of the late 1970s that now read as period costume and are half the reason people want a late one.

No factory competition programme ever existed for the CJ-5, and Jeep never pretended otherwise: through Willys, Kaiser and AMC ownership the vehicle was sold as equipment first and recreation second, and there was no series in American motorsport that a 60mph four-wheel-drive utility could sensibly contest. Its competition life is entirely amateur, and it is substantial. The CJ-5 was the default machinery for the off-road clubs that formed through the 1950s and 1960s, and it became the standard vehicle at organised trials, hillclimbs and mud events across the United States and Australia. The short wheelbase that made it awkward on a fast road made it the class benchmark on anything technical, and jeep-based classes at rockcrawling and trials competitions still exist in a direct line from those cars. The Dauntless V6 gave the vehicle a second competitive life in desert racing in the late 1960s in privateer hands. None of this is factory history and none of it produced championships in the usual sense, but the CJ-5 shaped what off-road competition looks like more than any purpose-built racer did.

The CJ-5 is the shape the word Jeep summons for anyone who grew up between the 1950s and the 1980s, and it earned that by being everywhere: on farms, at fire stations, in national parks, on beaches, and in the background of an enormous amount of American television. Its most consequential moment on screen was not a flattering one. In December 1980 a 60 Minutes segment carried an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety demonstration presenting the CJ-5 as liable to roll over in routine driving at relatively low speeds. It was later established that the testers had achieved eight rollovers in 435 runs through a corner, and that the IIHS had asked for weights to be hung inside the body at the corners, out of the camera's view, to produce worst-case conditions. The CJ-5's end after 1983 has been widely attributed to the broadcast, though the longer-wheelbase CJ-7 continued for three more years. The episode is now studied as much for what it says about televised safety testing as for what it says about the vehicle, and it remains part of any honest account of the CJ-5.

A CJ-5 asks for attention rather than money. The frame is the thing that decides whether an owner is happy: pre-1977 rails are unboxed and crack as well as rust, and the rear spring hangers and shock mounts are where it happens. Body tubs rot at the floors, the rear corners and the body mounts, and almost every survivor has been welded somewhere. On AMC-era cars the rear axle housing is the known weak point and gets replaced or braced by anyone who uses the vehicle properly. Leaks are a fact of life with a soft top, doors are optional equipment on many cars, and the short wheelbase means it wanders on a crowned road and does not enjoy motorway speeds. The steering box will develop play and want rebuilding. None of this is unusual for the type and none of it is expensive to put right, which is why so many have survived rough lives. What owners actually report is that the vehicle is almost impossible to strand you in, and that fixing it is part of the appeal rather than a tax on it.